Upon examining Employee A it was determined that he used two legal notepads per month, a dozen pens, six leads for his mechanical pen, five calculator rolls, and four reams of paper (used in making photocopies). Being an accountant this really didn’t seem excessive, until the manager really looked at how these supplies were being used. The cost of the office supplies that were used came to:
2 Legal Pads @ $0.82 each = $1.64
1 dozen pens @ $1.25 a dozen = $1.25
6 leads for mechanical pencil @ .5 X $1.28 for a dozen = $0.64
5 calculator rolls @ $1.05 each = $5.25
Four reams of paper in copier (500 pages per ream) @ $.10 per page for paper and toner = $200
The total for this one employee for the month came to $208.78, with the majority of the expense coming from copies made. Upon examination of how these supplies were used it was determined that the employee was indeed wasting supplies. Employee A misplaced pens often, and also retrieved new pens even when his original pen still had ink left in it. It was also determined that he had a tendency to pull on the calculator tape and then tear it off instead of advancing the tape with the button just far enough to retrieve the printout. This wasted, on average, about twice as much blank tape as printed on tape. The largest waste really came from the copies he made. It was discovered that this employee made twice as many copies as were actually used. This happened because of misplacing copies, copy errors made by the employee, and by making excessive copies of materials that could be reviewed easily from the original source.
In total it was found that this employee wasted about $105 worth of office supplies a month, with the majority of this amount coming from unnecessary copying. If this amount is multiplied by 12 months, then the annual amount of office supplies that were wasted by this employee alone comes to $1,260. If this amount is multiplied by the number of employees in a small office of 10 people the wasted resources comes to a total of $12,600. This is quite a large chunk of change to be throwing away. This amount is further increased when the amounts of office supplies that are abused and misused are added to the money spent on wasted office supplies.