After placing yet another order for toner and print paper, you might wonder what you can do to save your business money on printing. After all, with the thousands of packing slips, invoices, financial forms, and in-store advertisements you produce, printing might become one of your largest controllable expenses. But how can you shift towards economical printing without disrupting your daily workflow? Here are two ways your company could save money on printing, so that you don't drive your business into the ground by hitting "print."

1: Switch Fonts

Most people don't realize it, but printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids in the world. Ringing in at an estimated $2,700 per gallon, it isn't a mystery why your checkbook winces a little when you order office supplies. Although you might be tempted to save money by asking your employees to hand-write package labels or to make more phone calls, having your workers dramatically change the way they work might cause more problems than it resolves. Your employees might struggle to make the shift, and you might become the "printing Nazi," carefully monitoring ink and paper levels when you could be doing other things.

However, by doing something as simple as changing the default font on your work computers, you might be able to save a dramatic amount of ink. If you are using bold fonts or highly decorative varieties, you might be using more droplets of ink per letter than you need to—which can burn through ink in a hurry. However, even basic fonts can use a lot of extra ink if you print a lot. Fortunately, developers have developed a specialized font called "Ecofont," which is designed to use less ink than similar styles. If you look close at text printed in Ecofont, the silhouette of each letter remains the same, while the inside of each stroke contains tiny voids. Believe it or not, these voids are barely detectable and the text is still readable. In fact, one 2011 study found that Ecofont Arial used up to 28% less ink than traditional Arial.

Can you imagine being able to make your printer cartridges last 28% longer? To put that number into perspective, if your ink cartridges would have lasted one month, switching to a more economical font might stretch that timeframe out to 38.4 days, or a little over an extra week of printing.

2: Change the Resolution

That high-resolution setting might make your clip art look incredible, but if you forget to scale the settings back, you might be wasting loads of extra ink. When you set up new printers, they typically tote a higher resolution setting to provide a crisper look. However, if your staff typically prints basic text documents, that perfect resolution might not matter.

Go through your office and check the print resolution settings on your computers. For printed text to be readable, the resolution setting only needs to be around 300 DPI. However, if you are printing large text or drafts that you will throw away, a much lower resolution document might work fine. To save money, change the default resolution of your printers to 300 DPI, and consider using the "draft" setting on your printer if you are producing unimportant documents. This setting is designed to produce a low-resolution image, which works perfectly for things like checking overall formatting or making large labels. Save the high resolution printing for when it will matter, like when you are printing documents for upscale meetings with investors or creating permanent signs for retail areas. 

By making a few simple changes around the office, you might be able to protect your financial bottom line—without angering your employees. You can also click for more info.

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