Save money by simplifying your print

Find out how to simplify your printing school-wide to help you maximise your budgets in a time when finances are tight

There’s no doubt that the global energy crisis further compounded the financial pressures on schools and colleges. Forcing energy bills to rocket to unprecedented levels, it hit after budgets for educational institutions had been set for the year, and ahead of the nation-wide winter freeze that caught many unaware toward the end of 2022.

In practical terms, the crisis has filtered through to the decisions that educators need to make every day, especially those focused on what else can be done to save money. One cost centre that’s often overlooked, is print. Devices use energy, toner and of course paper. Left unchecked, print is an area where costs can spiral rapidly. This needn’t be the case. Print should be easy to do, easy to manage and easy on your budget, as well as secure and sustainable.

That’s our aim at PaperCut; to simplify printing school-wide to help you maximise your budgets and focus on what matters most: the delivery of high-quality education. Our cost-effective print management solutions make print easy and affordable for primary and secondary schools. We’re committed to delivering simpler-than-ever printing that just works – no matter your size, print fleet, operating systems, or the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) you or your students use.

Solving your unique needs while lowering costs

PaperCut keeps these costs low with full visibility, tracking, and tools for change. It simplifies the creation of policies like double-sided and black and white printing, for questioning whether you even need to print at all, as well as running built-in reports to see newfound savings and focus areas. 

Let print help protect the environment

PaperCut products help you introduce easy printing from any device – all while protecting student information, cutting costs, while drastically reducing waste. Given that the average student wastes 3,200 sheets of paper annually, costs and environmental harm can spiral when print isn’t managed effectively. Multiply that by the number of students, and you can appreciate the cumulative damage print can do to the environment… and your budget.

Print seamlessly from any device

Of course, print needs to help reduce costs and protect the environment. But print also needs to be smart, because most students have a smartphone, tablet or Chromebooks… so it’s crucial they’re all print-ready. Helpfully, PaperCut plus Mobility Print enables you to print from anything, anywhere, anytime, and no extra apps are needed. You can self-install Mobility Print in minutes to print from the device’s native interface, and avoid lock-in to specific brands and types.

Take tech adoption to the next level

Making print accessible to all hinges on having a user-friendly tool for teachers, students, and IT staff alike. PaperCut makes printing second nature for everyone. It harnesses powerful Google integrations, can deploy flexible configurations, offers the ability to scan straight to the cloud, and can search and edit documents with optical character recognition. As your needs change and your IT infrastructure scales and evolves, PaperCut is ready for it, ensuring long-term, on-going value in your investment.

Double down on data protection

Few things impact perceptions as negatively as a security breach, especially if it was avoidable. From student files to report cards, a lot of your school’s printing needs to be kept secure and confidential. It can help you reduce uncollected printouts by authorising release at the printer, to safeguard data with end-to-end encryption, and protect ownership with watermarks and digital signatures. Affordable print needn’t be unsecured print.

Print management for one-to-one environments, shared or student owned devices

Of course, knowing who is printing what and where can be difficult in environments with shared devices. It’s even trickier in one-to-one environments with mixed operating systems and student vs school owned devices. In recognition of this challenge, PaperCut has created a few helpful products and features to help you manage all of those clients. For instance, our free software Mobility Print supports all operating systems and even enables off-site and remote printing with its Cloud Print function, allowing users to print securely over the internet from any location.

In addition, we have our Print Deploy feature, a single solution that enables you to easily push print queues and drivers based on the person and their location. This provides teachers and staff with the flexibility to move around locations or floors and their printing will still work. That’s real-world print convenience.

Making printing easier – within your budget

Of course, schools want a simple way to enable teachers and staff to print, all while being cost and budget conscious. At PaperCut, we’re focused on combining convenient features with cost savings tools. One of our most popular features is Find Me printing. It provides users with the ability to send their print jobs to a single print queue from their computer or device, and release their jobs from whichever printer they’re close to, whenever they want.

And when you need more visibility into print, PaperCut MF and NG have a number of built in reports (over 50 popular one-click reports) that cover all perspectives of data from summary to detailed per-transaction logs. This gives your complete control and visibility over print, scan, copy, and fax to realise your full printing potential.

Investing in print to stay ahead 

The energy crisis has knocked everyone and everything for six. This could cause investment to stagnate, which has long-term financial and environmental implications. While it’s tempting to just ‘sit tight’ and ride-out the current economic wave, to do so is to create the perfect environment for unmanaged print-related costs to rise. Taking control of your print costs now and ahead of any further economic disruption, will bring financial stability and sustainability to all aspects of your print… at all times. 

To find out more about how to bring your print under control, why not download our free education eBook, available from papercut.com.          

This is a sponsored article brought to you by PaperCut.