Blogs | James Gilmore | March 2, 2022

Helping schools stretch their budget

It’s safe to say that five bucks won’t get you far in today’s climate. The average cost for a cinema ticket was $9.16 in 2019, and that’s before you throw snacks, food or drinks into the mix. A daily subway pass costs around $9, and when dining out, an average meal costs around $18 per person.

That’s true for education spending, too. Budgets are stretched dangerously thin in a nation that sees K-12 schools already spend a startling $640.0 billion – $12,624 per pupil annually. The budget dilemma also caused the US Department of Agriculture to announce an adjustment in school meal reimbursements to the tune of $750 million this year – to help students receive healthy meals while allowing schools to receive reimbursement rates to extend their operating budgets as far as possible.

It’s clear that today, schools need to be as cost-effective as possible while maintaining the standards required to foster an environment of learning, if they are to effectively cater to students and staff alike.

One way of ensuring a lot of bang for their precious buck is by switching to directprint.io’s serverless print management solution which costs just under $5 per user per year.

It may sound too good to be true, but you’d be wrong in thinking a low price point impacts the quality on offer. By ditching print servers, schools can cut spending without cutting corners, saving valuable time and money to focus elsewhere, safe in the knowledge that the printing infrastructure is safe and secure in the cloud.

Other benefits include:

Powerful insights

Receive highly detailed reports on print usage, areas of concern, and easily addressable errors or bottlenecks that enable you to see spending and control unwanted costs.
Specify print budgets for printers, rooms, properties, organization, or Google Org Units and receive an email notification when budget levels are approached or exceeded so you never unexpectedly overspend again.
View comprehensive print logs and user charts of each print by the user, account codes, print errors, and more, so you can see how resources are being used and where to reel them in.

Secure prints and reduced waste

Introduce on-device secure print capabilities to monitor sensitive documents and ensure they are released only by authorized users.
At directprint.io, we support two types of secure print to suit your needs: On-printer secure print release, using the printer’s internal secure print capability and Terminal-based print release, whereby any printer can be secure print enabled by simply placing a print release terminal near it.

Savings on supplies

Our unique toner/ink saving option helps schools save on toner/ink and paper, and is supported by a plethora of customizable print modes.
Users can select and preview a suitable print quality for their current job, such as draft, remove images, mono, ultra-draft, or more.
First run prints of large documents can be defaulted to draft mode to save toner.
Smart mode will ignore blank and one-liner trailer pages in order to eliminate blank pages.
Our Print Nudge feature encourages eco-responsible printing to help the environment and save costs.
Apply specific print policies to different types of users, such as enabling stapling and hole punching for some and forcing mono and duplex for others.

Round the clock support

What’s more, we offer all of the above with round-the-clock support. Our experts will be on hand to help you get set up, solve any deployment challenges, and ultimately lessen the load on your IT team – all whilst saving money with zero upfront costs!

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So, if you’re looking to stretch your school budget even further or simply want to take back control of your school’s printing, we’re here to help. And to get you saving right away, we’re even offering a free 30-day trial.