Average Yearly Cost of Paper in the Office

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Every year, American offices spend a small fortune on supplies to sustain their business. Regardless of your industry: paperwork needs to be faxed, forms filled out, and letters sent. It is also not lost on employers that all of these supplies cost money, money that is eating into their bottom line. The question is: exactly how much is being spent?
In the US, the average employee uses about 10,000 sheets of paper per year, or roughly $80 worth of paper. For a single employee, this number may seem paltry. Heck, if you were taking the costs of paper out of his salary it is unlikely he would notice save for a single line-item on every paycheck. However, that is only the cost of purchasing the blank sheets. There are numerous other costs that are included in just using the paper. Additionally, there is the time spent in labor, so there are still more costs to add in. In this article, we will break down all of the costs associated with using paper, and a solution to save you money.
Toner and Ink
Ink cartridges are expensive without question. In fact, the average costs of ink are enough to make one wonder if it is cheaper to replace a printer that has run out of ink than it is to buy a new cartridge. Black ink alone can cost anywhere between $45 and $55, while a three-color ink cartridge runs you approximately $45 to $60. Note that these are the per cartridge costs, and each employee is printing ten-thousand sheets per year as noted above.
Let’s pretend that you have a printer that takes high-capacity cartridges, and it can print 200 pages per cartridge. This means that every year, that one employee is burning through 50 cartridges of black ink at the very least. Note this is before we factor in graphics heavy printouts or use of colors other than black. Fifty cartridges translates to $2250 at a minimum to up to $2750 at a maximum. Note this is assuming you have a high-capacity cartridge, you might only get 100 pages out of that single cartridge. Either way, you are looking at thousands of dollars spent in ink for just the one employee, especially for graphics-heavy printouts.
Cabinet Space
Paper must be stored, and storage means space. Most offices with paper documents need to dedicate a room or two to office space. On average, an office may spend $23.30 per square foot of space per month. How much space you dedicate towards storage varies, but considering a scant five square feet can translate to over $100 per month, it is easy to see how quickly the costs of storage add up. Furthermore, these file cabinets must be secured in some way to limit access to authorized employees only.
The need to secure file cabinets adds to the costs. You need to install locks, manufacture keys, make replacement keys if those original versions are lost, track who has a key. This cost increases if you use electronic code locks or some other method to secure cabinets against unauthorized access.
Labor
In addition to storage, one must figure in the time needed to add documents to storage or retrieve them. If humans were perfect, and everything was always filed in its place, the time needed to find important documentation would rarely add up to more than the time it takes to walk to the cabinet and walk back to the desk. However, sometimes paperwork is misfiled. This means dedicating up to a dozen man-hours of time to locate the missing documentation, put the file cabinets back together and hopefully not misfile anything else, and then they can actually use the document in question.
The total costs of labor for physical document storage quickly add up when you include the hourly wages of everybody involved in hunting down documents, securing documents, and storing documents. Remember, time is money, and while you will always have to spend the money on an employee’s time, there is no excuse for that money being wasted.
Solutions
An article describing a problem is worthless without a solution. The best approach is to strive for a paperless environment. While physical copies of paperwork may be a requirement in many industries, digital references should always be available. There is plenty of software out there to assist with the paperless transition. Lucion.com, for example, offers scanning software solutions to help you move all that paperwork into a digital format, along with many other solutions. While the costs of the office may have once been unavoidable, technology has made many of these costs unnecessary. Make the transition, every day you do not is leaving money on the table.
The writer of this article, Brennen Kliffmueller, is a tech blogger who manages an office full time, and is well aware of the costs of paper and how it influences the bottom line. If you wish to learn more about him you can visit on Google+.

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