Ask a UK finance director to name their top five controllable costs and print rarely makes the list. Yet across the SMB and enterprise fleets we support, unmanaged print typically absorbs between one and three per cent of annual turnover β and roughly 30 per cent of that spend delivers no value at all. It is not one dramatic overspend. It is dozens of small, invisible leaks: the colour page that should have been mono, the third-party cartridge that failed halfway through a run, the two hours a week your IT team spends resetting drivers.
Why print costs hide so well
Print is unusual because the money leaves the business through several different doors. Hardware sits in capital expenditure, consumables in office supplies, service in IT, paper in facilities, and support time is never costed at all. No single owner sees the total, so no single owner questions it. The result is a budget line that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
- Fragmented purchasing β devices bought ad hoc by department, each with its own consumable range.
- Unmeasured volumes β few organisations can state their monthly page count by device, let alone by user.
- Default settings β colour and single-sided printing left switched on across the fleet.
- Emergency ordering β premium prices paid for next-day toner because nobody tracked stock.
- Hidden labour β helpdesk tickets, driver rollouts and queue rebuilds that never reach a cost centre.
The five most common leaks
- Over-specified devices. A team of six rarely needs a fifty-page-per-minute floor-standing machine, or the service contract that comes with it.
- Under-specified devices. The opposite is just as costly: a desktop unit running 6,000 pages a month will fail early and burn through supplies designed for far lighter duty.
- Uncontrolled colour. Colour pages cost several times more than mono. Without rules, internal drafts and email printouts quietly consume the colour budget.
- Non-genuine supplies. The headline price looks attractive until you count wasted pages, engineer call-outs and shortened device life.
- Abandoned output. Studies consistently find that a meaningful share of pages are never collected from the tray at all β paper, toner and energy spent on nothing.
What good looks like
Organisations that get print under control share a few habits. They know their page volumes. They standardise on a small number of device families so supplies and drivers are interchangeable. They apply sensible defaults β mono and duplex unless a user actively chooses otherwise. They use secure pull printing so nothing lands in the tray until someone is standing at the device. And they buy supplies on a predictable subscription rather than in a panic.
None of this requires a wholesale fleet replacement. In most of the audits we run, more than half the identified saving comes from policy and process rather than hardware.
A 30-day plan to find your 30%
- Week one β count. List every printing device, its age, monthly volume and consumable range. Include the machines nobody admits to owning.
- Week two β cost. Add hardware amortisation, supplies, paper, service and an honest estimate of IT support hours.
- Week three β challenge. Identify devices under 20 per cent utilisation, colour-heavy users, and any location with more than one device per ten people.
- Week four β decide. Set default rules, consolidate device families, and model the saving from a subscription or a managed service.
Turning the audit into savings
Most businesses find the exercise pays for itself before the fleet changes at all, simply by switching defaults and rationalising ordering. From there, an EcoPro subscription can make monthly costs predictable from as little as Β£1.99 a month, while Managed Print Services hand the counting, monitoring and replenishment to someone else entirely. Either way the principle is the same: you cannot control what you have never measured.
Brother has spent decades helping UK organisations take that first count, and we are ready to be at your side when you make it.