Aside from cheap tricks to reduce paper and ink costs, you can take a broader perspective of your company's use. Print Job Manager records who prints what, how much, and provides other details about where you can cut back. Sure, it's an incremental step to savings, but for bigger businesses especially, those bits can add up.

Your biggest initial question is if a Print Job Manager can save money, since you'll pay for it per-user or -computer. Prices scale fairly well to small installations, but I think you'll only recoup your initial investment--and then some--with dozens of employees. Regardless, if your office seems to have a high volume of printing, check out the 30-day demo to see if it'll fit your needs.

Essentially, you'll install Print Job Manager on client PCs and print servers, and it acts as a gateway and auditor. You can restrict users to certain printers, limit the amount or kind of prints they can make, or just gather these and other details about general use.

The biggest savings comes from curtailing things that don't need to be printed; any business can set up rules if you don't seem big enough to benefit from Print Job Manager. But if you've got many printers and users, the software can save time determining where you're wasting resources and then police the plan.

Zack Stern is building a new business from San Francisco, where he frequently contributes to PC World.