Digging for Data with Abacus

Data is gold in business, but like gold, it’s a lot of work to dig it up. If you can’t recover your costs, it’s wasted effort.

A great example is tracking print costs on a job.

Printing costs money, even if you own your own printers, and those costs will have an impact on your margins. But it takes effort to capture the data, especially if you’ve got a team of people working in different departments, at different locations, and on various jobs. To get it right, somebody has to keep track of the number of prints that were produced for each job, which prints were billable, how many were color and how many were black and white, and enter the production cost of each print based on the printer that produced the documents. The work of capturing all that data has to deliver a margin increase to justify it.

But what if you didn’t have to balance that equation at all? What if you wanted all the details and didn’t have to consider how hard it would be to track down all the data, and how to get it into the accounting system?

You’d just do it, right? A tool like that would basically increase your project margin for free, so why wouldn’t you?

That’s why you should take a look at Abacus, ARC’s print management software for your office printing network.

First, Abacus seamlessly fits into your printing environment and workflows, allowing all printing activity to be tracked, assigned, and billed accurately without disrupting your teams. It even tracks prints your employees make when they’re working from home.

Second, Abacus integrates with your accounting system, ensuring staff is always billing to the correct project, phase, and task. The system actually captures the data in real-time and imports it into your accounting system when you are ready to invoice your customers.

After each print, a pop-up appears on a user’s desktop for immediate tracking.

With robust permissions and review features, you can automatically assign a print manager to individual projects and give them the tools to monitor, review, and approve all printing expenses assigned by their teams.

Once your print managers sign off on print activity, the finance team can review all or a part of a project’s printing expenses, adjust as necessary, and push the data back into the accounting system to complete billing.  All of this can happen without any manual data entry.

Project printing can be viewed at any time with all the details, or in summary, to keep costs in check and on track.

Finally, Abacus can see across your entire print network. It helps you manage the big picture, including the use of individual printers, setting user permissions for printing in color or black and white, establishing network rules to avoid waste, and essentially dialing in your company’s print usage and equipment to make it as efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective as possible.

Get a view of printing activity and costs across your company’s entire print network.

It can be a lot of work to get the print data you need to improve your margins and make your teams more productive at the same time. It’s even harder if you’re tracking it with spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and the general ledger.

Quit digging for gold with a garden trowel. Bring in the backhoe! Call for more information about Abacus today, (833) 272-8880.