Budgeting your letterhead printing cost

How often a MNC ask its departments to ascertain the budgeted requirements of letterheads printing, there is budgetary allocation for almost all promotional and advertising items but hardly you will see it for letterheads and envelopes printing.

Undoubtedly, the maximum requirements for letterheads and envelopes comes from banking sector, in banks letterheads and envelopes are printed with blank template format with bank logo and other necessary elements as per corporate guidelines and rest of the elements like address, department name etc are printed using screen printing and respective department cost centers are debited as per the actual usage.

Important multicolor elements like logo, ISO certification mark, tagline, punch line, website address which needs to remain same on all department letterheads/envelopes are printed using advanced multicolor offset printing machines, many private limited banks print these stationery items as much as 10 millions in one financial year and then all these letterheads and envelopes stays with the printer and are printed and dispatched to various department and their respective locations as per the requirement, banks and other MNCs hardly take care of the logistic and storage part of these stationery items.

You would be surprised to note that almost every year either the printed stationery items are under printed or over printed by as much as 10-15% that is substantial number, you can imagine a shortfall of roughly around 10 lacs letterheads and envelopes and the shortage is compensated by ordering from local printer which charge roughly twice the initial cost as this shortage will correspond to small quantity only when taken location wise and there is also delay in operations because of this. Letterheads can be easily taken care of as many banks allows their managers and BOMs to print them from local printer at branch level but there is serious shortage of envelopes which is felt.

More so, the point is hardly any serious planning goes in procurement of these stationery items by purchase department at central level, one of the well known bank recently ordered for above 1 crores of letterheads and envelopes for one financial year and only few months later the management communicated the change in brand communication appeal making all printed stationery items useless, image what a massive wastage of resources.

Higher management were right in their view of keeping everything secret till the very last and purchase department had no idea whatsoever about the upcoming brand image change resulting into loss.

It is imperative for all big corporation to seriously take budgeting of their stationery requirement as it hurts them on both fronts.