The unit the allowance is issued in is the wrong one
Copy budgets arrive as a lump: a number of pages for the year, or a code that stops working in April. Neither form tells a teacher anything about the decision in front of them, which is always whether to run this particular double-sided handout for this particular class today. Converting between the two is one multiplication and almost nobody does it.
Three sections of 28 students is 84 pupils. At four sides each per week over an eighteen week term that is 6,048 sides before a single jam. If the allowance was five thousand, it ran out around week fifteen, and it ran out during the unit that most needed the handouts. Running the multiplication in August gives you a rate — in this case about 3.3 sides per student per week — that you can actually hold in your head at the copier.
Sides, sheets and where duplex helps
The distinction matters because different things are counted by different systems. A side is one printed face. A sheet is a piece of paper, carrying one side or two. Copier contracts and per-page charge-backs almost always count sides, sometimes called impressions or clicks. Paper cupboards and reams count sheets.
Duplex halves the sheets and does nothing to the sides. If your school charges per side, duplex printing saves you no money at all and saves a real amount of paper, storage and student backpack weight. If your school charges per sheet, or you are buying the paper yourself, it halves the bill. Both arrangements exist and it is worth knowing which you are under before treating duplex as a budget measure.
| Counted in | Who counts it that way | Does duplex help |
|---|---|---|
| Sides or impressions | Most copier service contracts and per-page charge-backs | No effect on cost, real effect on paper |
| Sheets | Paper purchasing, storage, anyone buying reams | Halves it |
| Reams | Supply orders and cupboard space | Halves it, in steps of 500 sheets |
Colour is not a rounding error
The default figures here have colour at five percent of sides and roughly seven times the cost per side. That combination puts about a quarter of the money on one twentieth of the pages. The result panel prints that ratio for whatever numbers you enter, and it is usually the most surprising line on the page.
What follows from it is a specific decision rather than a general instruction to use less colour. Most colour printing in a classroom is a diagram or a photograph where the colour carries information, and those are worth what they cost. The expensive habit is colour that arrived by accident — a document with a coloured header, a logo, a chart whose greyscale version is perfectly readable. Neither this page nor anyone else can see which of yours is which, but the money figure tells you how much is at stake before you go looking.
Spoilage, and the honest version of the rate
The jam and rerun allowance covers the copies that never reach a student: the jam that eats eleven sheets, the run started on the wrong setting, the extra ten made because two students are always absent and one always loses it. Four percent is the default here and it is a guess rather than a measurement. The way to get your own is to compare a month of copier counter readings against a month of what you intended to print, which most machines will show you, and which is a fifteen minute job that fixes the estimate for good.
The category breakdown exists for the same reason. A total tells you whether you are over. The split tells you which habit to change, and the answer is frequently not the one that felt biggest — practice worksheets are usually the largest single line and the hardest to cut, while spare copies and reprints are a smaller line that is almost entirely avoidable. The costs in that table are whole cents and are allocated so they add to the term total exactly, so you can quote a line without the pieces failing to reconcile with the whole.
Adjacent tools: the paper size calculator covers the dimensions when a handout has to be scaled or imposed, the photo print calculator handles image sizing on a page, the classroom supply calculator does the same term-total arithmetic for consumables that are not paper, and the quiz sheet maker builds a printable in the browser.
Questions people ask
What does a page actually cost?
There is no figure this page can give you, and any number quoted as typical would be wrong somewhere. Schools run wildly different arrangements: a service contract with a fixed cost per impression, a leased machine where the paper is bought separately, a departmental charge-back at a rate set by the business office, or no charging at all with a hard page cap instead. The rate also differs between the copier in the workroom and the printer in your classroom, sometimes by a factor of ten. Ask whoever manages the machines for the per-side figure and put that in the field.
Does duplex printing save money?
It saves paper always and money only sometimes. If your school is charged per side or per impression, which is how most copier contracts work, then printing two sides on one sheet produces the same two impressions and the same cost, and the saving is entirely in paper, storage and weight. If you or your department buys the paper, or the charge is per sheet, duplex halves that part of the bill. The results panel shows the sheet saving separately from the cost so the two do not get conflated.
How do I work out my own pages per student per week?
Take the last full month, count the distinct things you handed out, and multiply each by the number of students who received it. Divide the total by the number of students and by the number of weeks. Doing it from memory reliably undercounts, because the memorable items are the big packets and the volume is usually in single sheets. If your copier reports a counter, the difference between two readings a month apart divided by students and weeks gives the same figure including everything you forgot.
Why does the breakdown table have a spare and reprints line?
Because it is real and it is almost always missing from an estimate. Extra copies get made for absent students, for the ones who lose things, for the second class that turned out to need it, and for the run that came out crooked. It is a small rate per student per week and it compounds into a substantial number of sides over a term. It is also the line with the most slack in it, so seeing it costed separately is more useful than having it hidden inside the worksheet figure where it cannot be argued with.
Can I use this for a whole department rather than one teacher?
Yes, with one adjustment. Put the total number of students across the department into the section arithmetic — for example one section of 420 rather than trying to model each teacher — and use an average sides per student per week. The result will be right in total and useless for the breakdown, because the mix differs by subject far more than the volume does. If the point of the exercise is to work out where a departmental budget is going rather than what it totals, run each subject separately and add the answers.