Abuse of office supplies occurs when employees use company supplies for personal use. This can take the form of stealing supplies from the supply closet to take home for personal use, or from simply using office supplies and machines for personal use without reimbursing the company. This can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars of year in non-company use expenses. In addition to the money that you lose from stolen or abused office supplies, your loss from office supply mis-usage is compounded by the amount of money that is lost because employees are using the wrong office supply for a job, or because they are using more office supplies than are required to sufficiently accomplish the task.

For example, an employee may paper clip a half sheet of legal notebook paper to a file instead of simply using a small sticky note. In this instance two wrong office supplies are used in stead of a single inexpensive office supply designed for the task. This one correction may only save you two cents, but when hundreds or even thousands of events per month compound this amount, the amount of savings quickly adds up.

The second way you can save money on your supply expenses is to find the best supplier for your office supply needs. To calculate the amount of money that you actually spend per item will be based on the amount of time needed to order or purchase an item, the list price of the item, delivery costs, time spent for processing the invoice, and time spent dealing with customer service for damaged items and returns. If you are dealing with a company that offers you low per item prices, but has bad customer service you may actually end up paying more money for your supplies than if you bought the items for a slightly higher per item price from a company that offers excellent customer service.

For example, if you buy your copy paper from an online store that sells you a case of paper for $20 which includes delivery costs, however, to order the items your administrative assistant has to call the company’s long distance number and spend on average 15 minutes to place the order then you are actually paying $20 for the paper + $3 for payroll expense + 15 minutes @ $.1 per minute long distance, or a total cost of nearly $25 for the case of paper if everything goes smoothly. This purchase price increases if there is a problem with the order, or the order is damaged and you need to return the item for an exchange. You will have to pay your administrative assistant’s wages for all the time it takes them to fill out claim forms and reorder a new case of paper.

To determine if your current method of buying supplies is the best for your company you need to compare the time and money that you spend each month compared to the estimated time and money you would pay if you used an alternative method. For example if you currently buy office supplies at a physical store your expenses would include travel expense to the store, employee time, price of supplies bought, discounts offered, travel expense back to the office, and bookkeeping expenses to enter purchased items into inventory and accounts payable. For companies that have offices close to an office supply store this may be a practical option as they can walk or drive quickly to the store location and return to the office in less than a half an hour. This may be more cost effective than paying a shipping charge and having to wait days for the items to arrive. However, to determine if your current option is the best you will need to make several comparisons including online stores that offer free shipping, physical store purchases, and utilizing delivery services.