August 25, 2010

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Tips For Internal Controls For Big And Small

By Gregory M. Coy and Cheryl R. Olson

With the downturn in the economy and the fact that funding from both private and governmental sources has decreased for numerous nonprofits, many of these organizations are considering how to make do with increasingly limited resources. With less funding for technology, personnel and other needs, groups have delayed or scrapped planned technology improvements, are delaying staffing increases or have decreased staff in areas such accounting and administrative functions.

This is important because many nonprofits struggle to have sufficient internal controls, even in a good economy. With the pressures to cut costs, internal control and specifically segregation of duties suffer. This might not need to be the case. Even with decreasing or limited resources, many nonprofits might be able to achieve a sufficient level of internal control and segregation of duties by setting the tone at the top by the board of directors, the finance committee, the audit committee, and organizational senior management.

When it comes to internal controls and segregation of duties, many organizations will ask, “Isn’t it so much more efficient and easier to have one person do everything in the cycle, so why do we care about internal control.” As we all know, internal controls are important for many reasons including:

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The paperless office gets a lot of mouth time, but in the real world, it still seems way off. That means that printing isn’t going away anytime soon.

Choosing a printer isn’t getting any easier, though. For many organizations, inkjet printers signify low-end units that don’t last and which require fairly expensive ink cartridges which produce only a small number of pages before they have to be replaced.

Laser printers aren’t much better. They are often faster, and produce somewhat higher quality under some conditions, but the supplies cost can be staggering when the toner cartridges need to be replaced. And with most laser printers, the toner cartridges last about 1,000 or 1,500 pages. That’s better than the itty-bitty cartridges most inkjets use, but still not all that impressive.

As a true business capable printer, inkjets haven’t made much progress until very recently. Hewlett Packard introduced its Edgeline inkjet-based technology on mid-range MFPs in the $20,000 plus range. It wasn’t well received in the business marketplace, and has come and gone without making much of a splash. Memjet has been promising a very fast, very high-quality and very inexpensive inkjet printer for several years now. We’ve seen videos. We’ve heard promises. We haven’t seen any office products yet.

One ray of sunshine is Epson’s B-510DN business inkjet. At $600, this is not a printer for the home. But it is as capable as pretty much any laser printer in its price class and provides the network connectivity necessary for a printer used in a business environment.

Epson quotes a maximum speed of 37 pages per minute and 18 color pages per minute as measured using the ISO (Industry Standards Organization) test method. Of course, like any printer, the speed varies greatly depending on what’s being printed and print quality. ISO print speed tests and toner yield tests assume 5 percent page coverage. Many print tasks require significantly higher page coverage. Duplex printing (printing the front and back of the page) also slows down the output speed.

The B-510DN’s real claim to fame is the cost per printed page. Color printing is expensive. The average color laser cost per color page is usually averages between eight and eleven cents per page. Pages printed on an inkjet printer can cost somewhat more or less than this. Even monochrome page printing is not cheap, though at between one and three cents per page, it’s much less expensive than printing in color.

The B-510DN cost per page is much less than this. If you use the highest capacity ink cartridges, the cost per color page is less than four cents, with monochrome pages costing less than a penny.

These cartridges have unusually high capacity compared to other inkjet printers or even most lasers. The standard capacity color cartridges are rated at about 3,000 pages, with a black cartridge producing about 3,500 pages. Each cartridge (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) costs about $50, way less than the average replacement price for a color laser cartridge. Epson has other capacity cartridges available for the B-510DN, with the highest capacity black cartridge producing about 8,000 pages ($70) and highest capacity color cartridges producing about 7,000 pages ($60). You’re not going to get sticker shock when you need to purchase a replacement cartridge. With some laser printers, a full set of replacement toner cartridges costs as much, or even more, than the printer originally did.

Finally, the B-510DN has a business-sized monthly duty cycle of up to 20,000 pages per month. That’s four cases of paper with 10 reams in a case. You probably won’t print that much every month, but the B-510DN can take that kind of a monthly print load at least occasionally without committing suicide.