What Printing Really Costs Your Business (And Why Nobody Tracks It)

Printing is the last unmonitored line in most IT budgets. Businesses spend thousands a year on toner and maintenance without ever knowing the real number. Here's how to find out.

Ask any business owner how much they spend on IT support, cloud services, or even mobile phone contracts and they'll give you a reasonable answer. Ask them how much they spend on printing and you'll get a blank stare.

Printing is the last truly unmonitored cost in most businesses' IT budgets. It takes up a surprisingly large chunk of expenditure, yet almost nobody tracks it. And the less you track something, the more it costs.

Here's what we see across the businesses we support, and what you can do about it.

The Hidden Cost of 'Cheap' Printers

That desktop printer you picked up from a retailer for under a hundred pounds? It was designed to be cheap to buy and expensive to run. The manufacturer makes their money on the ink and toner cartridges, not the hardware.

This is the classic razor-and-blades model, and it works brilliantly - for the manufacturer. For your business, it means:

• Toner costs that dwarf the purchase price. A set of replacement toner cartridges for a typical desktop colour printer can cost more than the printer itself. Over two or three years, you might spend five to ten times the original purchase price on consumables alone.
• No visibility of actual usage. Consumer printers don't report on how much you're printing, who's printing, or what it's costing. You find out you've run out of toner when a print job comes out streaky.
• Downtime when things go wrong. Warranty-based printers come with manufacturer warranty, but that typically means posting it back for repair. In the meantime, your team can't print.

Two simple questions reveal the problem:

How much do you print on that printer?

How much does it actually cost you?

Most people can't answer either question. That's the problem.

Why Printing Slips Through the Cracks

Every other IT cost has accountability. Your managed IT support has a clear monthly per-user fee. Your Microsoft 365 licences show up on a predictable invoice. Your internet line has a fixed monthly cost.

But printing? Toner gets ordered ad hoc by whoever notices the printer is running low. Sometimes it's bought on Amazon. Sometimes it's from a different supplier each time. The cost gets absorbed into general office supplies and nobody adds it up.

We've seen businesses spending well over a thousand pounds a year on toner for a single printer without realising it. Multiply that across three or four devices and you're looking at a significant chunk of your IT budget that's completely unmanaged.

The Lease Trap

If you've already looked into managed print and ended up with a leased copier, you may have walked into a different problem entirely.

The majority of the managed print industry operates on a model that benefits the provider, not the customer:

• 5-year lease agreements that lock you in regardless of whether the device still meets your needs
• Inflated per-click charges that look small but add up to far more than the cost of consumables
• Automatic renewal clauses that extend your contract if you miss a narrow cancellation window
• Exit penalties that make it cheaper to stay than to leave, even when you're overpaying

If you're currently in one of these contracts, it's worth knowing exactly when your notice period falls and what your options are. Even if the renewal date is years away, diarising it now means you won't miss it.

What a Proper Print Audit Reveals

The first step to getting printing costs under control is understanding them. We work with a specialist print partner who provides a print monitoring tool that runs quietly in the background for a month or so and collects the facts.

The reports it generates show:

• Exactly how much each device is printing - broken down by colour vs mono, single-sided vs duplex
• What it's actually costing you - the true cost per page including toner, maintenance, and device depreciation
• Where the waste is - colour printing that could be mono, single-sided printing that could be duplex, devices that are barely used
• How much you'd save with a properly managed setup

This data-driven approach has accounted for the vast majority of print improvements we've delivered. The numbers don't lie, and they usually surprise people.

The Ownership Model: An Alternative to Leasing

Not every business needs a managed print service, and we'll say so honestly. But for those that do, the model we offer through our print partner is fundamentally different from the leasing approach:

The device comes with direct manufacturer warranty and national service coverage. When something goes wrong, a manufacturer engineer fixes it - not a third-party call centre.

And if our print partner looks at your setup and decides a managed service genuinely doesn't make financial sense for your business, they'll tell you. That's why we work with them.

The Security Angle Most Businesses Miss

While we're talking about printers, there's a security dimension that catches most businesses off guard.

Modern printers are network devices. They have IP addresses, they store documents in memory, and they can be accessed remotely. An unsecured or outdated printer is a genuine entry point for attackers.

In 2020, ethical hacking group CyberNews demonstrated this by remotely accessing nearly 28,000 unsecured printers worldwide. These weren't sophisticated attacks - they simply found printers that were exposed to the internet with no security configured.

Business-grade managed printers include security features that consumer devices don't:

• Secure print release - documents only print when the user authenticates at the device, so sensitive papers don't sit in the output tray
• Encrypted storage - documents held in the printer's memory are encrypted
• Access controls - restricting who can print, copy, scan, and access device settings
• Firmware updates - managed and applied as part of the service
• Network segmentation - properly configured printers sit on a managed VLAN, not exposed to the open internet

If you're already having conversations with us about Cyber Essentials or broader security improvements, printers should be part of that conversation.

What You Can Do Right Now

1. Add Up What You're Actually Spending

Gather every toner purchase, every maintenance call, and every printer replacement from the last 12 months. The total will probably surprise you.

2. Ask Yourself Two Questions

For every printer in your business: How much does it print? How much does it cost? If you can't answer both, you've got an unmonitored cost.

3. Check Your Contracts

If you're in a print lease, find the contract. Check the term, the renewal clause, and the notice period. Mark the dates in your diary.

4. Consider a Print Audit

We can deploy monitoring software that runs in the background and gives you hard data on your actual print costs within a few weeks. No obligation, no commitment - just facts.

The Bottom Line

Printing isn't exciting. But unmonitored costs have a habit of growing quietly in the background. The businesses that track their print spending consistently find they're paying more than they thought, often significantly more.

Whether it's consolidating consumer printers into a properly managed device, escaping an overpriced lease, or simply getting visibility of what printing actually costs - the first step is the same: find out the facts.

Read the Full Guide

We've put together a comprehensive Ultimate Guide to Managed Print covering everything from ownership vs leasing, contract traps to watch for, how our print audit works, and real case studies showing the savings. It's free, no download required, and there's no form to fill in.

Want to know what printing is really costing your business? Get in touch and we'll set up a no-obligation print audit. If managed print makes sense, we'll show you the numbers. If it doesn't, we'll tell you that too.