How your printer can be the best thing

Get your small business humming

So your team hates printers but they’re a necessary tool to get your small business humming along. These sometimes mysteriously tricky boxes don’t have to be a headache for your users, or a money/ time suck on your technical resources.

In fact, by the end of this guide, you may develop a certain fondness for your printer fleet.

We want to help make printing at your small business easy, so you can get back to the harder job of balancing your business and technology needs. We hope that by the end of this guide, you and your employees will be friends with printers again.

Wait, why isn’t printing easy anymore?

A good question. Technology usually pushes towards simplification, right? Banking is easier, booking a ride is easier, even checking your spelling is easier! So why isn’t printing easier?

The answer is… other technology. We’ve seen an explosion in personal devices (phones, tablets, and laptops). We’ve changed how we work (VPNs, the cloud, WiFi, remote working). And your poor old printer has had to try and print and copy and scan using all these new (and constantly improving) technologies.

And quite honestly, it’s been hard. Printers aren’t computers. They’re simply not designed to work out-of-the-box with the myriad of operating systems and devices now available.

That’s where PaperCut software steps in. Our software sits between all those technologies and your humble printing, making printing easy again. We take care of the connection challenges. And after we connect everything together, we provide a simple printing experience for your team - regardless of their device or the printer brand. Printing just works.

Printing in small businesses

In this ebook, we’ll explore the modern challenges businesses like yours are experiencing, and briefly explain how PaperCut goes about righting those wrongs! Let’s get into it…

The five main challenges

1. Lowering costs and improving efficiency

2. Remain future-ready - scalable technology investments

3. Securing your print environment

4. Improving productivity and automation

5. Super simple and unified experience for your users

1. Lowering costs and improving efficiency

There are two things you are looking to balance here, the cost of printing resources and the use of your or your team’s time. In terms of costs, paper and toner can easily get out of hand if you’re not able to have some level of accountability or thoughtful printing habits.

Accountability: full visibility and tracking

Accountability: full visibility and tracking. View in-depth rundowns of print activity for single users, groups, departments, and more. Assign quotas or limits to individual users or entire teams to make sure printing funds go where planned.

Thoughtful habits: Create print policies

With friendly prompts for your users to print in duplex or grayscale, you could find your printing costs cut in half! You can even enable pop-ups to check if the user even needs to print that email at all, OR, run built-in reports to see newfound savings and focus areas. Sometimes people’s habits can change when you put cold hard facts and numbers down in front of them in the form of a print report.

The best use of your team’s time

Other disruptive technologies are evolving at a breakneck pace and it’s impossible for you and your team to keep up. You have a limited budget and what you would really like to be doing with your time is finding ways to collaborate with your non-technical leaders to align technology changes to business objectives. In an ideal world you’re not spending all your time dealing with printer connection or configuration issues on your print network. You need printing to be easy for your end user and to just work.

There are a couple of things you can do to help your team save precious minutes: set up BYOD printing, schedule automatic reports, or bonus, place restrictions for groups or departments.

BYOD printing: Everyone has a mobile/cell device and/or company-provided laptop, and ideally they want to print from all of them. Users need to know how to set up/install printers quickly (on their Windows or Mac laptop, Chromebook or something strange) AND users should be authenticated.

It can’t be a security-free for all in your network. We can help - AND we can make this really easy and enjoyable for your end users.

Schedule automatic reports: if you’re here, it’s likely you have a printing set-up that’s a little “Wild West-ish.” This is especially the case if you have a decentralized printing environment across the few locations/offices you and your team manage.

Now, however, you need to know who is printing… or how much they print… or if they’re always printing color… or never printing doublesided… or even how much you’re spending every year on printing.

Once you can get the current state of play through reports, you’ll know what areas of your print environment you want to improve.

Restrictions for groups or departments: this isn’t meant to be “Big Brother” at all. Instead, printing rules, routing and policies can empower your users to make better choices about their printing.
Encourage duplex printing when users forget, or based on document criteria, automatically convert simplex printing to duplex.

You can even go so far as to specify which groups or departments have access to specific printers or color printing. Or one of our favorites: remove duplicate or “double submitted” jobs. That’s right, you can automatically delete duplicate documents issued within a set time!

2. Remain future-ready

You’re like any other business leader who’s trying to see your business grow. Technology is helping you do that, and in some cases, helping you get a leg-up on your competition.

Of all the things in your tech stack you don’t want your printing to hold you back. Printing should be the most boring part of your portfolio because it should just work, and work well into your future.

Ideally, you can find a print software that provides the same experience at all of your stages of growth, no matter how big or small you are.

This could mean you find a print management software that will work on any brand of printer you use now or in the future. Even better, you can find a software that will work on any platform, in all environments.

This was just the first section of "How your printer can be the best thing in your office space". Want to download the full ebook?

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