How to Calculate Your Printer's CPP

A couple sounds are familiar to any office: keys clacking away, coffee being drank, and the rattling, squawking hum of the printer. Yet this image presents a critical question: do you know how much your printer is costing your company each time it is utilized? Let's review how you can calculate this investment.

Why Cost-Per-Page is Critical
It is common knowledge in the business world that, in order for a printer to properly print, it needs to have ink with which to print. This ink comes in the form of ink cartridges, which need to be replaced once the ink within them has been spent. Alas, these cartridges are anything but cheap, and you usually have to purchase multiple cartridges to get the full advantages of a multicolor printer.

That is part of the reason that it is imperative for you to recognize your printer’s average cost-per-page (CPP), or at least have a figure that is relatively close. If your organization relies heavily on paper documents in its daily processes, these costs can be significant.

How to Calculate the Average CPP
The calculation to determine your CPP is relatively easy: just divide the price of the cartridge by the cartridge yield rating, or how many pages the cartridge should be expected to print. This number can be found on the cartridge’s packaging.

Thus, if you spent $25 on a cartridge of black ink with a yield of 525 pages, your formula would look like the one below:

25/525 = 0.048

...resulting in a cost of about 5 cents per page.

Calculating CCP in More Complicated Printers
Not all ink cartridges are the same, of course, which can add a step or two to this calculation. Since many modern printers now rely on different cartridge configurations, like an individual cartridge for each color (black, cyan, yellow, and magenta) or two cartridges that cover them all (black, and cyan, yellow, magenta). Nevertheless, your calculation will be more or less the same, with minor adjustments to account for how the colors are divided or clustered.

When adding color into the equation, find the CPP of each color and combine your totals, including black. It is imperative to remember that when printing something in color, you’re probably going to use just as much, if not more, black ink as well.

Furthermore, it is critical to consider that ink cartridge manufacturers will often base their yield rating on standardized business documents, with a certain percentage of the document being covered in ink. Moreover, printing something that doesn’t fit into these constraints will throw off the yield, which can happen based on what kind of document you are printing, and even what kind of paper you’re utilizing.

Controlling Your Prints
Calculating your investment into each print can also supply you with invaluable insight into the inner-workings at your office. Mainly, it may show you that you are spending far more than you need to be on printed materials.

Macro Systems can assist with that. We can help you implement the solutions that will allow you to cap each user’s printer use, streamlining and optimizing your ability to utilize it and remain fiscally responsible. Alternatively, we can also offer collaboration solutions that can help reduce your reliance on physical documents entirely.

Give us a call at 703-359-9211 to learn more!