Printing Costs/Management

[Sam3]

Hi all,

Does any of you know how much you print each month? I've been running the free Papercut for 5 weeks to see how much we are printing and the figures have come out at around 14,000! This is from just 2 colour laserjet printers and doesnt include any of the photocopying or printing made from local printers. Is this a lot for a primary school?

Also does anyone have any ball park figures on what each print out may cost. I'm thinking of getting the full version of Papercut but im not sure it will be worth it.

Thank you!!

[tmcd35]

We're a high school of about 850 pupils/100 staff. We have something like 6 colour, 15 b/w printers and a photocopier. Current report from Papercut says we've printed 29,180 pages in the last 30 days. Apparently that's 34% of a tree! So we're on target for killing 4 tree's a year.

Costs? depends on printer. Most B/W pages are set at 2p a page. A couple of really good printers, like the HP 4250, I've set to 1p a page. Colour is in th 6-8p a page bracket.

[Sam3]

Has it made a difference to costs using Papercut?

[Achandler]

We use Papercut, we printer 40,000 pages in the last month. This doesn't include photocopying but does include staff printing jobs to photocopiers (which has lowered photocopying over the last year or so).

Using Papercut has allowed us to see where printing is being done excessively and tackle it, such as students now print way way less then before. We also use it to make people think where they print things, for example printing to a large MFD is "free" on Papercut, printing to local printers is most expensive and to networked shared printers is in between. This has reduced printing on smaller printers and increased it on the MFDs which should be saving money.

[elsiegee40]

Hi all,

Does any of you know how much you print each month? I've been running the free Papercut for 5 weeks to see how much we are printing and the figures have come out at around 14,000! This is from just 2 colour laserjet printers and doesnt include any of the photocopying or printing made from local printers. Is this a lot for a primary school?

!

Gulp! Yes that's a lot from my PoV. We don't print that per year! Small school -150 kids.

It was awful, but I used the stats to show that one third of printing was done by a single user, one third by the pre school and the final third by everyone else including the office staff. That combined with our very high toner bills was enough for the HT & Bursar to order me to clamp down. The staff HATED it, but as I had 100% support from the top, it was tough!

It does depend on whether you have networked copier/printers. If you do, volumes will be higher as printing a class set is acceptable.

Before we got a copier/printer, I blocked printing more than 2 copies of stuff to force staff to use the photocopier which was cheaper per page.

[tmcd35]

Has it made a difference to costs using Papercut?

Not yet. In fact I'm sure printing has increased each year for the past 5 years. Papercut, at the moment, is used as a monitoring tool. It makes a differences being able to see and track printing patterns. I've just started to issue termly reports to head's of department so they can see what they are actually using. I'm hoping these reports will drive down printing, if not then Papercut becomes evidence that we need to look at print quotas or recharging departments for prints.

[IrritableTech]

I've just run a monthly check to find that my school (1300 pupils) printed 63,599 pages (79% of a tree) in the last 30 days.

We moved to papercut three years ago. It wasn't a popular decision, but a necessary one! We started charging departments @ 3p per sheet mono, and 10p per sheet colour. These figures were based on toner, paper and maintenance/replacement costs. It has proven to work out fairly well over the years with our printing budget staying stable.

When we started it had a big impact on the amount people were printing. However it has creeped back up now. We have started adding a very small watermark to prints. It means anyone is able to trace a print back to the user, without bothering us.

[Norphy]

These are the stats from our Papercut install:

Users
3,634
Printers
102
Devices
14
Total Pages
4,150,330
Pages today
11,137
Active user clients
669
Environmental Impact
36.26 trees
13,135.5 kg of CO2
827,049.4 hours running a 60W bulb
Since Mar 7, 2011

That's... quite something!

[Sam3]

These are the stats from our Papercut install:

Users
3,634
Printers
102
Devices
14
Total Pages
4,150,330
Pages today
11,137
Active user clients
669
Environmental Impact
36.26 trees
13,135.5 kg of CO2
827,049.4 hours running a 60W bulb
Since Mar 7, 2011

That's... quite something!

That really is something!Wow!

[Roberto]

We've printed about 16,000 sheets so far today...

[TecD]

Does anyone know how much its costing you? you can set up a limit block on PaperCut to reduce the cost as this would have a knock on affect to your lease using cost per copy.

[Edu-IT]

What do you mean TecD?