Three Ways to Cut Your Printing Costs

Managing a small business is all about managing your expenses. There are big costs that you think about cutting, but there are also many small expenses that should factor into your thinking. Oftentimes, the benefits of cutting several small expenses will outweigh any large cut that you could manage. Cutting your printing costs could be a great way to do this. Research has found that printing and copying expenses account for one to three percent of overall costs for most businesses. In some cases, they can account for as much as five percent. Here are a few ways to bring that down.

Understand Your Fonts

Changing the font of your printing jobs can greatly affect the number of pages you have to print. Font is measured in points; there are about 72 points in one inch. That means that a letter printed in a size 72 font will be about one inch tall; a letter printed in size 36 font will be about a half an inch. Therefore, going down two points in your font size will reduce the overall length by about 1/36th or nearly three percent. That simple change would reflect a three percent reduction in your printing expenses.
Then, you should also consider the actual font. Fonts have vertical height but they also have widths. The width of fonts differs depending on style. Furthermore, the space between the letters will differ between different fonts. That could save you a significant amount of space as well, greatly reducing the number of pages. You should research which fonts fit the most characters onto a single page.

Flip the Orientation

Oftentimes, pages can be saved by flipping the orientation to landscape; this is especially true if you’re printing PDF pages from a book. Orienting them horizontally and reducing the font can compress two or more pages onto one page. Cutting the number of printed sheets in half can significantly reduce your printing expenses.

Shrink the Charts

One of the biggest expenses in small business printing comes from charts and graphs. They’re oftentimes large and colorful on the page to draw the eye. They contain helpful information but they might be overly large. You can likely shrink them down without losing readability. Furthermore, they likely don’t need to be in color. When you convert the chart to grayscale, every color is represented by a different shade of gray; therefore, the original meaning of the chart is preserved.
These steps may reduce your printing expenses by up to 50%. That could be a huge saving for some businesses!