Printing Costs

[ictrich]

Hey

 

Im trying to get to grips with what is an acceptable amount of prints/copies for a 380 pupil primary school.

 

Since a new MFD was installed in the first week of September, we have 60,000 prints/copies.

 

Last year our annual budget was 10k (and kept to). This year we are up to 6K in a month.

 

Would appreciate anyones input with a similar size school?

 

Cheers

[xenonive]

I might be worth installing something like Papercut to monitor who and how many prints are being done and if needed limit how much they can print. We have 1300 students limiting the number of credits they get per month and budget about £25k a year.

[ictrich]

We use papercut and can see who is printing what, however, the staff are saying they only print what they need!

 

The SLT did not want to impose restrictions at this point. The majority of printing is from the staff.

 

Hence, I was interested in what others have as a budget.

 

Personally I would have thought 10k a year for a primary was more than enough!

[rad]

Just to clarify, your printer is saying it has printed 60,000 have you bought in that much paper?

 

Are you sure that is correct? Thats almost 4 boxes of paper a day.

[Garacesh]

Just to clarify, your printer is saying it has printed 60,000 have you bought in that much paper?

 

Are you sure that is correct? Thats almost 4 boxes of paper a day.

Valid point. How often are you replacing the toner? 60,000 copies is going to burn through toner, even on an MFD.

You're positive your logs are correct? The MFD didn't come with a high print count already on it?

[xenonive]

Some printers/copiers also log 4 prints for colour , one for each colour so maybe need to test by doing a print and reading the count.

[ictrich]

Nope its all legit, The room full of paper is now almost empty, counters were on zero plus engineer install numbers.

 

Its a lease machine, so the toner is just ordered in as and when.

 

At 60000, thats 500 per reem, so 120 reems. 5 Reems to a box , so thats 24 boxes used in a month. thats about 1 box a day?

[notalot]

We are a secondary school with 1100 students and 150 staff.

 

In September we put through 205,000 (that's not a typo) ish pages, that is staff and student printing as well as reprographics.

 

As others have said install Papercut or some other print management software just to monitor the printing, it can generally point out the worst offenders.

[ictrich]

Just realised that the 6k figure I quoted is way out. It appears I cant use decimal points!!!

 

I still think 60000 in a month is high for a school our size.