Here is a number that should stop you in your tracks: businesses spend between 1 and 3 percent of their annual revenue on printing. For a company turning over $500,000 a year, that is up to $15,000 quietly disappearing into paper, ink, and wasted print jobs. The good news is that most of those costs are completely avoidable – and you do not need to rip out your entire print setup to fix it.
Start With a Print Audit
You cannot fix what you cannot measure. Before making any changes, spend a week tracking exactly how much your office prints, which departments print the most, and how many jobs go uncollected from the printer tray. Studies suggest nearly half of all printed pages are never picked up. That is ink and paper going straight to the bin.
A basic print audit does not require expensive software. Simply review your printer’s usage logs – most modern inkjet and laser devices track page counts by job type. What you find will almost certainly surprise you. Once you know where the waste is happening, every other strategy on this list becomes sharper and more targeted.
Change Your Default Print Settings
This is the single fastest win available to any small business. Most office printers default to single-sided, full-color printing at standard quality – the most expensive combination possible.
Switch your defaults to:
- Duplex (double-sided) printing – cuts paper consumption by up to 50 percent instantly
- Black and white by default – color printing can cost up to eight times more per page than monochrome
- Draft mode for internal documents – uses significantly less ink with no impact on readability for everyday memos and reports
These three changes alone can reduce your monthly printing expenses by 30 percent or more. Employees do not need to think about it; the printer does the work for them automatically.
Get Smarter About Ink Cartridges
Ink cartridges are where small businesses consistently overpay – often without realising it. The sticker price of a cartridge tells you almost nothing useful. The number that actually matters is your cost per page: the cartridge price divided by its page yield.
High-yield cartridges cost more upfront but deliver a far lower cost per page than standard cartridges. For a business printing daily, that gap compounds fast. If your team runs Epson inkjet printers, sourcing the right Epson ink cartridges at the correct yield for your print volume is one of the most direct levers you have on your monthly ink spend.
Beyond yield, the OEM versus compatible debate is worth understanding. Original equipment manufacturer cartridges carry a brand premium. Quality compatible Epson ink from a reputable supplier delivers the same sharp text and vibrant colour output at a fraction of the price – without voiding your printer warranty when sourced correctly. The key word is reputable; low-grade compatible cartridges can cause printhead clogging that costs more to fix than the savings were worth.
Print Less; Print Smarter
The most overlooked cost-reduction strategy is simply printing less. It sounds obvious, but most employees print out of habit rather than necessity. Ask your team one question before every job: does this document actually need to exist as a physical page?
Digital alternatives handle most tasks that used to require paper. Meeting handouts can be shared as PDFs before the session. Contracts and onboarding documents can be signed electronically. Internal reports can live in shared drives. Each of these swaps cuts paper and ink costs directly.
For jobs that genuinely require printing, preview the document before sending it to the printer. Catching a layout error on screen costs nothing; catching it after a 12-page color print job costs real money.
Match Your Ink Type to the Job
Not all ink is suited to every print job, and using the wrong type quietly inflates your cost per page. Pigment-based inks – like Epson DURABrite – are ideal for text-heavy business documents because they resist fading and smudging. Dye-based inks deliver richer colour saturation and are better suited to photo or graphic printing.
Using premium photo-grade Epson printer ink for everyday invoices and internal memos is a common source of unnecessary spend. Matching the ink formulation to the actual print job keeps quality high where it matters and costs low everywhere else.
Small business printing costs are not a fixed expense. They are a management problem with a practical solution – and most of the fixes cost nothing except a few changed default settings and smarter purchasing decisions on consumables.
