Printing Cost Calculator – Calculate Your Cost of Printing

Printing Cost Calculator

How much does your company spend on printing costs each year?

If you find yourself or your coworkers printing often, you might be interested to know how much these printings are costing your company.

A study by Gartner found that companies spend between 1 – 3% of annual revenue on printing. This means that if your company has an annual revenue of $10 million, $100,000 – $300,000 is being spent on printing!

Your cost of printing can be broken down into two main sub-categories focusing on printing costs and the other being process costs.

Printing Costs

Printing costs are any expenses incurred through your printer. This includes the cost of your printers, the cost of your printer consumables like ink, and the cost of printing paper.

Printers

A Gartner study has stated that the actual purchase price of a printer accounts for about 5% of the total lifetime cost of the printer.

This is because the additional costs of ink, paper, maintenance, and energy all add up over time, essentially making each piece of paper you print, costlier than the previous one.

So, if you spend $500 on a printer, which can vary from three to five years, it will cost you $10,000 over its lifetime.

Printer consumables

Printer consumables like ink cartridges, toner, printer paper, and energy all add up to your total printing costs.

The price you pay for ink and toner will vary depending on the type of printer you use, but in general, a replacement ink or toner cartridge can cost anywhere between $5 – $100.

Of course, the more frequently you print, the more ink, toner, paper, and energy you will consume.

Paper

It is estimated that the average employee prints out 10,000 sheets of paper per year and the average cost for paper is anywhere from half a cent or less per page to two cents, while premium paper can cost up to ten cents per page.

This means that on average a single employee uses around $50 – $200 per year on printing and $1000 per year if they print with premium paper.

Interested in learning more about managing print costs? Check out this free whitepaper on considerations for reducing your printing costs!

Wasted documents

A study conducted by Lexmark found that an average of 17% of printed pages were considered waste.

This means that 1700 printed-out pages for a single employee are considered a waste every year!

Knowing that each paper costs anywhere from half a cent or less per page to two cents for regular paper, this means that a single user wastes about $8.50 – $34 per year.

Process Costs

Process costs are more so the unseen costs that occur through wasted user productivity and IT maintenance.

Downtime

How much productivity time do you think a person loses waiting for their print environment to be fixed?

A study by Gartner shows that the cost of downtime for computer networks at $42,000 per hour.

This means that a company that suffers from downtime of even 24 hours a year can lose around $1,000,000 a year.

But of course, the outage will affect each company differently, so it is important to take a closer look at calculating downtime.

Downtime cost = (number of employees) x (average employee cost) x (duration of wait time)

So, for a company with 500 employees at an average cost of $25/hour, with a wait time of 2 hours, the downtime cost would be $25,000.

Maintenance

At the same time as downtime productivity costs, there are also direct labor costs of having to maintain your print environment.

Direct labor cost = (number of system admins) x (average system admin cost) x (duration of maintenance time)

So, a company that has 1 system admin that spends 5 hours per week maintaining your printing environment at $40/hour, will have a direct labor maintenance cost of $200 per week.

If you multiply that by 52 weeks, you will get a total direct labor cost of $10,400 per year.

How does your IT print spending measure up?

Not all aspects of annual IT print expenditures have been covered in this article as many different factors go into the Total Cost of Ownership depending on your industry and company.

One thing to keep in mind is that once you do have a general idea of your annual IT expenditures and your total ownership cost, the next step is figuring out how to cut down on those costs.

How much does a piece of paper cost?

On average, a standard piece of paper costs anywhere between half a cent to two cents per sheet.