What happens during a print audit, and what it tells you

Most businesses know roughly what their printing costs, but very few know how it breaks down. A print audit is simply the process of finding out: which machines you have, what they are actually doing, and where the money and effort are going. It is not a sales exercise dressed up as a survey — done properly, it is a stocktake and a measurement exercise, and the recommendations come afterwards.

What an audit actually looks at

The starting point is an inventory. That means walking the building and listing every device that prints, copies or scans, including the small desktop units that were bought quietly by individual departments and never appeared on anyone’s asset list. For each machine you want to record the make, model, age, location and what it is connected to.

Next comes usage. Printers and photocopiers keep internal counters, and those counters are the most honest source of information available. They show total pages, and usually a split between mono and colour, and between print, copy and scan. Reading them across the whole fleet turns opinion into fact: the machine everyone complains about may be handling a fraction of the volume of one nobody mentions.

The questions an audit is trying to answer

• How many devices are there, and how many are genuinely needed?
• Which machines are heavily loaded and which sit almost idle?
• How much output is colour that could reasonably be mono?
• Where are consumables being held, and is there stock for machines you no longer own?
• Which devices are old enough that parts and service are becoming a concern?
• Who has to walk furthest to collect their printing, and does that shape behaviour?
• Are scanning and network printing set up consistently, or device by device?

Why the counters matter so much

Volume is the single biggest driver of running cost, and it is also the best guide to whether a machine is the right size for its job. A small desktop unit carrying a departmental workload will consume cartridges quickly and wear out early, because it was not designed for that duty. Equally, a large multifunction device producing very little is an expensive way to serve a handful of users. An audit puts those mismatches side by side so they become obvious.

Waste tends to show up in patterns, not in single events

Printing that nobody collects, documents printed in colour by default, duplicate copies of the same report, and single-sided output where double-sided would do — none of these is dramatic on its own. Across a year and a whole office they add up. Because an audit measures rather than guesses, it usually surfaces one or two habits that are easy to change, such as setting mono and duplex as the default on shared devices, or turning on secure release so work only prints when the person is standing at the machine.

What you get at the end

A useful audit finishes with a clear picture rather than a proposal you cannot check. You should come away knowing what you own, what each machine is doing, which devices are nearing the end of their working life, and what could be consolidated, moved or reconfigured. From there, decisions about servicing, replacement or a managed print arrangement are yours to make with the facts in front of you.

It also gives you a baseline. If you make changes, the same counters can be read again later to see whether volumes and colour usage actually moved. Without that first set of numbers, there is nothing to compare against.

How to prepare for one

• Gather any existing lists of devices, serial numbers and service arrangements.
• Note where consumables are stored and what is on the shelf.
• Flag machines that people complain about, and machines that are rarely used.
• Make sure someone can provide access to rooms and cupboards where devices live.

Getting an audit done

Advanced Printing Solutions carries out print audits for businesses across England, covering Konica Minolta, Ricoh and Xerox equipment among others. Cristian has worked as a print engineer since 2000, and when you call you speak to the engineer directly rather than a call centre — which means the findings are explained in plain terms and you can ask follow-up questions of the person who did the work. To arrange an audit, call 07730 330415 or get in touch.