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Most companies do not buy individual printers for employees; it is too costly.  Normally one printer/copier is purchased for 5 to 10 people from various departments and backgrounds which then quickly results in lots of misplaced copies (i.e. where no one is put in charge, things go to hell quickly). To avoid this from day one, assign one person, preferably the last person hired who will not complain about this duty, as the ‘printer monitor’.

Someone has to ensure business documents keep moving. A surprising number of documents will appear, sit on the machine and not move during the business day without provocation. All of these copies come from a variety of sources.  Here are a few strong arguments why you need one person responsible and accountable for the duty of getting these documents properly distributed.

Documents received that need attention sitting on your community printer:

• Sales orders:  Incoming sales orders may be faxed to the wrong department (i.e. purchasing, human resources, accounting) which need to be forwarded quickly to your inside sales group.  Do not let sales orders sit on any printer. If your employees do not realize this yet, you as a manager are doing a lousy job.
• Employee inquiries:  Incoming faxes requesting employment confirmation, retailers running credit checks on your employees for personal loans and other personal data information are received and need to be forwarded to human resources quickly.
• Court orders:   A company will receive numerous child support, alimony and garnishment notices through the mail.  If they go unanswered, the court clerk will not stop. They will be faxed to you so someone needs to answer these requests to prevent  your employees from being hauled into court and spending a weekend due to nonpayment.
• Vendor requests for payment:   You will receive faxed, open invoice statements, (unpaid accounts payable invoices now past the due date). These vendor requests need to be forwarded to accounts payable in order to be answered and addressed.  Note: Sometimes purchasing gets these because they deliberately sent to the buyers so they will complain to accounts payable.
• Material certifications:  Vendors sometimes fax in or email directly to your printer, requested material certifications required by your purchase orders. These normally are forwarded to your quality control personnel or purchasing.
• Material safety data sheets (MSDS):  When your firm buys practically anything to be used in the production process (i.e. material, chemicals), your employees have the right to know how to handle it properly, and what it contains, which may be harmful to them. These notices are provided by your vendors by law and sometimes are sent separate from the invoices to accounts payable personnel.  They are required under OSHA to be filed and made available to employees at your facility.
• Laboratory analyses/rest results:   Testing results for required tests performed on your products sometimes are forwarded to your community printer. They need to be identified then forwarded to either inside sales, quality control or purchasing personnel.
• Federal and state agency requests (multitude of options):  Depending on the agency, your printer may receive requests for census bureau surveys, solicitations for government bids, information about unemployment claims and eligibility (SUTA and FUTA), workmen’s’ compensation claims, requests for unpaid sales taxes or unfiled sales tax returns, etc.
• Failed faxes notices:  When your personnel go to the printer/fax and send a fax, the machine may spit out a failure notice (bad or busy telephone number).  The person who sent this fax needs to know this for a variety of reasons.  They may have replied to a court for an employee. They may have forwarded a sales order to a distant inside sales office and the order was never delivered.
• Employee personal data:  Human resources personnel may sometimes leave copies or fax material on the printer that need to be removed immediately and returned to that department to keep personnel data private.
• Vendor payment history requests (credit references):   Sometimes your customers will give your firm as a reference, which will provide payment history and possibly a good reference to another vendor.  Those requests come many times on a fax, asking for a response. There are only a select number of people who can respond to these requests which may be after you get permission from that customer first.  These requests will occasionally need to be verified in order to avoid scams.
• Accounts Payable statements and invoices:  Your firm may receive invoices by email or by fax which end up on this printer/copier. They will be printed out and end up sitting on this printer. They are sometimes accompanied by trucking bills, bills of lading and other documents required by the purchase order.  All must be forwarded to accounts payable for processing.
• Timesheets from remote offices:   Your printer may receive timesheets from your remote offices which need to be collected and given to payroll personnel in order for employees to be paid.
• Delivery tickets/ receiving reports from remote offices:  You receive goods and services at remote locations other than the one that pays the bills, thus multiple items are sent in to be processed and paid if properly approved.
• Solicitations received:    Many solicitations are received at various hours due to sellers gathering fax numbers from the internet in an attempt sell directly to companies.  These can be given to purchasing for consideration or tossed per procurement’s instructions.
• Leftover copies:   Sometimes copies will be made and the maker does not pick them all up.  It may be impossible to know who made the extras so they most likely need to be destroyed. You must determine when this occurs in order to train your Printer Monitor.
• Redirected copies/emails from other departments:   If employees have the discretion to redirect copies to other network printers, you could have copies show up anytime when printers are down, thus your assignee needs to call other departments to identify who printed the copies and if they are to be destroyed or retained.

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