In a little company that uses a couple of printers in a single place of work, you are most likely not concerned with your printing costs. However, if you are in charge of a large infrastructure operating hundreds of different printing devices, these charges do affect your company's resources and you should most likely look at some ways to optimize the usage of your corporate printers and reduce costs.

Let's see what you print mainly in your office. You don't know? The workers simply send jobs to the printer over your network and print server does not provide a way to check this? Uncontrolled printer always costs you more money! It disappoints your personnel, threat your company security and wastes everyone's time. In order to start reduction we need a print manager program. You should start to manage your printing. You need software that would do the following:

" Log all print tasks on all your print servers in your corporation. The log should have data for each document about the user who sent it to the printer, printer settings, ink/toner yield and the cost of this printer task.

" Save all documents that go through the printer as images for later reviewing. The first page of the document is enough. You cannot rely on the titles only. You know how often they do not match the content. It is very good for security reasons as well. If employees know that theirs print jobs are managed, they'll think twice prior to printing out own files and data that was not intended to be printed in your organization.

" Control all the print servers in our organization from the one place. You need centralized print task information storage and one monitoring application, scheduled printer usage reporting, notifications and information delivery for administrators.

" Be accessible over the network and maybe from the Internet for geographically-distributed divisions (with access control of course). Preferably with a web browser for simpler access or with management console

" A limited set of printing information should be accessible for personnel. They will see the print management in action.

" Be capable to set quotas for clients, groups, printers and for whole print server. It can reduce your printing costs dramatically. Limits for printing are very powerful and effective mechanism for cost management on printing in your company. Limiting printing actions for some personnel, you can really save on a paper, a toner for printers (especial at a color printing), charges for repair and service for printers.

Take a look on HSLAB Print Logger print manager software system. This is a comprehensive and very efficient enterprise-level solution for keeping track of the usage of numerous printers connected to print servers in your business and limiting it on the basis of a variety of criteria. Prices start at $39. Exactly the half cost of one cartridge for our laser printer. Not a bad since you'll be saving lots of them soon.

The application continuously monitors print jobs submitted by users to print servers and saves this data to its own or company database, which greatly facilitates reporting and following cost analysis. HSLAB Print Logger can be installed as a Windows 2000...2008 service and allows you to produce ad hoc HTML reports and access them from any place over the TCP/IP protocol. The network administrator can limit access to statistical data for certain users, user groups or IP addresses. Print Logger program available in several editions. This allows to best fit customers' needs.