Cutting Printing Costs: 5 Common Procurement Mistakes That Are Wasting Your Budget

Most Atlanta business managers assume their print spend is under control. A stack of toner cartridges in the supply closet, a service number on the wall, and a copier lease signed three years ago. Done. But after performing hundreds of free print assessments across metro Atlanta, we see the same mistakes repeated by companies of all sizes. And those mistakes are costing real money – often tens of thousands of dollars a year that nobody inside the organization is tracking.

Here are the five procurement errors we catch most often, and exactly what to do about each one.

Mistake #1: Focusing on the Machine Price Instead of the Cost Per Page

This is the most common trap. A business buys a printer for $299 because it seems cheap. Two months later, a single toner cartridge for that machine costs $89 and yields only 1,200 pages. That works out to roughly 7.4 cents per black-and-white page – more than three times the cost of running a properly managed office copier.

According to Gartner research, companies consistently underestimate their total print spend by 30 to 40 percent because they track hardware separately from supplies, maintenance, and the staff time spent managing printer issues.

A business-class multifunction copier on a managed lease typically delivers black-and-white pages at 1 to 1.5 cents each. That gap adds up fast at 20,000 pages a month.

Mistake #2: Automatically Reordering OEM Toner

OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. It means the toner brand that matches your copier brand – HP toner for an HP printer, Sharp toner for a Sharp copier. The manufacturers design their pricing models around selling hardware at a slim margin and recovering profit on supplies. A business that auto-reorders OEM cartridges without questioning it is essentially paying a premium on every single print job.

High-quality compatible toner cartridges, manufactured to the same yield and output specifications, routinely cost 20 to 40 percent less. At our facility in Marietta, we manufacture HP-compatible toner cartridges that deliver enterprise-level print quality – the same dark blacks and sharp edges – without the OEM markup.

The important caveat: not all compatible toner is equal. Low-grade generic cartridges can damage fuser units and void service agreements. The quality of the manufacturer matters. Ask for documentation on yield testing and compatibility before switching.

Mistake #3: Buying Equipment Outright When Leasing Makes More Financial Sense

There is a persistent belief in business procurement that owning equipment is always better than leasing. That logic made more sense in 1995. Today, copier and printer technology changes fast – security vulnerabilities, firmware limitations, and workflow integration features improve significantly every three to four years.

When you buy equipment outright, you tie up capital, take on full repair liability after warranty expiration, and often end up stuck with a machine that cannot support the cloud integrations or secure printing protocols your IT team needs. Leasing converts that capital expenditure into an operating expense. Under IRS Section 179, lease payments on business equipment are often fully deductible, which changes the effective cost calculation significantly.

One client in Sandy Springs was spending $14,000 upfront every four years on copier replacement, plus unpredictable service bills. After switching to a structured lease with an all-inclusive service agreement, their total print cost dropped by 28 percent and their CFO could finally budget the line item with confidence.

Mistake #4: Managing Print Devices as Individual Machines Instead of a Fleet

Walk into most mid-size offices and you will find a Sharp copier in the hallway, an HP laser printer under someone’s desk, a Brother machine in the conference room, and a Canon in accounting – each on its own service contract, each ordering its own toner, each going down at a different time and requiring a different technician.

This fragmented approach is expensive in ways that are hard to see. Each service contract has overhead built in. Each machine going down creates a separate support call and wait time. Supplies are ordered reactively instead of proactively. And nobody has a clear picture of total print volume across the organization.

The MPS program at Creative Office Solutions includes proactive device monitoring, automated toner replenishment, and detailed usage reporting – all under one agreement, one invoice, and one point of contact. For businesses with five or more print devices, fleet management almost always delivers a measurable reduction in both cost and administrative overhead.

Mistake #5: Procuring New Equipment Without a Print Audit First

This one is the root cause of many of the mistakes above. A print audit – a systematic review of every print device in your office, its usage volume, its cost per page, its placement, and its service history – takes about two to three hours on-site and costs nothing when done by a qualified dealer. Yet most businesses skip it entirely and simply replace aging machines with a similar model from the same brand they have always used.

We recently audited a 60-person professional services firm in Alpharetta. They had eleven print devices. After the audit, we found that three of them were responsible for 78 percent of total print volume, two machines had not printed a single page in the previous 90 days, and one high-volume device was running at a cost-per-page nearly five times higher than comparable hardware. The right fleet for their needs turned out to be four devices, not eleven – with annual savings of over $19,000.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, right-sizing a print fleet also reduces energy costs and supports corporate sustainability goals – a bonus that increasingly matters to clients and stakeholders.

Stop Overpaying for Printing

Print procurement is rarely given the same scrutiny as larger budget lines, but it deserves it. Between inflated cost-per-page rates, OEM supply markups, inefficient equipment ownership structures, fragmented fleet management, and procurement decisions made without real data, most businesses are spending significantly more than they need to.

The fixes are not complicated. They require the right partner, the right data, and a willingness to look at your print environment as a managed system rather than a collection of individual machines.

If you are in metro Atlanta and want to know exactly what your print spend looks like – and where the waste is – request a free consultation from Creative Office Solutions. We will audit your environment, calculate your true cost per page, and give you a clear picture of what a right-sized, managed print fleet would actually cost. No obligation, and no sales pressure – just real numbers.

Creative Office Solutions | (678) 501-4030 | Contact Us