How to run a print audit

A print audit is a count of every device you actually own, what each one costs to run, and how it is used. Done properly it takes a few hours spread over a week, not a specialist visit, and it puts you in a stronger position before any conversation with a supplier.

Start with the devices, not the contract

Most print audits start in the wrong place: the current contract or invoice. Start instead by walking the building. Every business under-counts its print estate because the machines nobody thinks about are rarely the ones on the master agreement.

Look for the mono laser under a desk that finance bought outside procurement. Look for the device in the warehouse or the second site that never made it onto anyone’s spreadsheet. Look for personal inkjets that individual staff bought because the shared printer queue annoyed them. Each of these is a cost, a security gap, or both, and none of them show up if you only read the invoice.

Walk every floor and every room, not just the ones with a photocopier in the corner. Write down make, model and location for each device you find, whether it is under contract, leased, owned outright, or nobody’s responsibility at all.

Pull the meter readings

Every networked device keeps a running count of pages printed, usually split by mono and colour. Most manufacturers’ web interfaces show this from a browser on the same network, under a menu with a name like “device information” or “counters”. Where a device reports to a fleet management tool, the reading is already logged there.

Record the current reading for every device, then check it again after a fixed period, a week or a month, so you have a real volume figure rather than a guess. A single reading tells you cumulative lifetime output, which is not very useful. Two readings a known number of days apart tell you an actual rate, which is what you need.

Separate mono from colour

Cost per page is normally billed at two different rates, mono and colour, and the gap between them is usually significant. A device with a low overall page count can still be expensive if a large share of its output is colour. Break each device’s volume down by mono and colour separately rather than working from a single combined total.

This also tells you something behavioural. If a device set up for general office use is producing a high proportion of colour pages, it is worth asking why. Sometimes it is a default setting nobody changed rather than a genuine need.

Work out what you actually spend

Gather the last few invoices, whether from an MPS supplier, a lease company, or a consumables reseller, and separate the spend into categories: the click charge or cost per page element, any minimum committed volume charge, servicing if billed separately, and consumables bought outside the main agreement, such as toner ordered directly because a device ran out and nobody wanted to wait for a service call.

That last category is easy to miss and often larger than expected, because it does not appear on the main print bill at all. Check purchase ledgers or expense claims for toner and drum purchases outside the contract.

Note the age and condition of each device

While you are walking round, note roughly how old each device is and how often it breaks down, even informally. A machine that jams weekly or has needed several call-outs in the past year is costing time as well as money, and that cost rarely appears on an invoice at all. It shows up instead as staff time lost queuing at a working device elsewhere, or as work delayed while a service engineer is booked. Age also matters for a different reason: an older device nearing the end of its practical life is a weaker candidate for a new long-term agreement than one with years of useful life left in it, and that distinction is worth having clear before any conversation about replacing or extending anything.

Check who is actually using each device

Volume tells you how much a device produces. It does not tell you who is producing it or whether that use is proportionate to the team nearby. Where you can, note roughly how many people sit within easy reach of each device. A high-volume machine serving a large team is behaving as expected. A high-volume machine serving a handful of people is worth a second look, because it may be printing material that could be handled another way, or it may be serving people from elsewhere in the building who have adopted it as their unofficial main device rather than the one nominally assigned to them.

Identify what is under-used and what is a bottleneck

With device locations, volumes and costs in front of you, two patterns tend to stand out.

The first is under-use: a device sitting in a quiet corner producing a handful of pages a month, still costing a minimum committed volume charge or standing lease payment regardless of output. The second is the opposite problem, a single device serving more people than it comfortably can, with a queue at print time and staff walking to a different floor rather than wait.

Both are worth flagging even though the fix for each is different. Under-used devices are a candidate for consolidation. Overloaded ones are a candidate for a faster machine or a second unit nearby. Either way, you cannot see either pattern without the walk-round and the meter readings behind you.

What a supplier’s free audit will tell you, and what it will not

Most managed print suppliers offer a free audit as a way into a conversation, and it is worth understanding what that audit is actually for. A supplier’s audit is very good at recommending their own solution to whatever it finds. It will produce device counts, volume estimates and a proposed fleet, generally geared towards a scope of devices they can see and a proposal they can price.

What it will not do is dwell on your invoices from a previous agreement, question whether you need managed print at all, or highlight the devices bought outside procurement that a site walk by someone from outside the business is unlikely to stumble across in a single visit. It is not dishonest, it is simply built to lead somewhere.

Doing your own audit first changes the conversation. You arrive with your own device count, your own volumes and your own current cost, and a supplier’s numbers can be checked against yours rather than taken as the only version available. If their estimate of your volume is noticeably different from your own meter readings, that is a useful question to ask before going further, not after signing.

What to have ready before you talk to anyone

A short document listing every device, its location, its mono and colour volume, and what it currently costs, is worth more at the start of a supplier conversation than any amount of back and forth about “roughly how many printers you have”. It also gives you a baseline to measure a proposal against later, and something to compare when reducing office print costs becomes the next question. If you are still mid-contract, the audit is also the groundwork for working out what managed print services actually cost when your renewal window opens.

You do not need specialist software or an external visit to produce this. A spreadsheet with one row per device, columns for location, age, mono volume, colour volume and current cost, built from an afternoon of walking the building and an hour reading invoices, is enough to change the conversation with any supplier from the outset. It also becomes the reference point you return to later, whether that is checking a supplier’s proposed volumes against your own, or working out a year from now whether the estate has actually changed shape since you last looked at it properly.