Business Stationery Printing: What a Small Business Actually Needs to Order

Decide the format before you decide the product

Printed business stationery is one of the few areas of print where the sizes were settled long before anyone reading this was in business, and that is a gift. The A-series sizes used across the UK are set by the international standard ISO 216, which specifies the trimmed sizes of writing paper and printed matter. Every product in a stationery set is derived from that same sheet.

That matters practically, not academically. An A4 sheet folded in three fits a DL envelope. Fold it in half and you have A5. Your document wallets, your window envelopes and your franking machine all assume the same starting sheet. The moment you specify something non-standard — an oversized letterhead, a bespoke envelope — you have created a compatibility problem that will surface every time you post something.

So the first decision is not “what shall we print” but “are we standard”. For nearly every small business the answer should be yes. Save the bespoke formats for marketing pieces where the point is to stand out on a desk.

The three items that earn their keep

These are the items that get used often enough to justify a print run in almost any trade.

• Letterhead. Still the default for quotes, contracts, formal correspondence and anything you want to look considered. Even businesses that send almost everything by email keep a letterhead, because the one letter a year that has to be posted is usually an important one.
• Business cards. The highest return per pound of anything in the set. They are cheap in quantity, they travel, and they are the only item on this list a customer is likely to keep. Our printed business cards service covers the stock and finish options in detail.
• Compliment slips. The quietly useful one. A third of an A4 sheet that goes in with a delivery, a returned document or a cheque, and saves you writing a letter. Our compliment slips page covers sizes and quantities, and we have a fuller explainer on when a compliment slip is the right thing to send.

If you print nothing else, print those three. They cover correspondence, introduction and enclosure, which is most of what paper is still doing for a modern business.

The situational set: print these only if your trade needs them

The second tier is where stationery budgets get wasted. Each of these is genuinely useful to some businesses and dead weight to others.

• Printed envelopes. Worth it if you post regularly and want the envelope to be opened rather than binned. Not worth it if you post twice a month — a good label on a plain envelope does the same job.
• Document wallets and folders. Genuinely useful if you hand over a pack of paperwork at a meeting: surveyors, solicitors, estate agents, anyone presenting a proposal. Pointless if you deliver everything as a PDF.
• Multi-part carbonless sets. Still standard in trades where someone signs on site and leaves with a copy — deliveries, servicing, mobile repairs. If nobody signs anything at the kerbside, skip them.
• Labels and stickers. These sit somewhere between stationery and packaging. If you are sending goods rather than documents, they often matter more than the letterhead does.

The test for each is simple: can you name the last five times you would have used it? If not, it is a nice-to-have, and nice-to-haves have a habit of sitting in a cupboard until the phone number changes.

The paperwork the law expects you to produce

There is one genuine obligation worth knowing when you plan a stationery set, and it is about documents rather than design. GOV.UK is clear that where both you and your customer are registered for VAT, you must give them an invoice by law — and that an invoice is not the same thing as a receipt.

That does not mean you need a printed invoice pad. Most businesses now raise invoices from accounting software and send them as PDFs, which satisfies the requirement perfectly well. It does mean that if you work somewhere a laptop is not practical, a printed set that captures the same information is the sensible alternative rather than a nostalgic one.

There are separate rules about which company details have to appear on your business correspondence. We are covering those properly in their own guide rather than summarising them badly here.

Paper weight, finish and the one mistake people make

Paper weight is measured in grams per square metre, and for stationery the useful ranges are narrow.

• Letterhead: 100–120gsm. Lighter feels flimsy in the hand; heavier starts to jam inkjet and laser feed paths, which is a real problem if you print onto your own letterhead in-house.
• Compliment slips: usually matched to the letterhead so the set feels consistent, sometimes a little heavier.
• Business cards: 350–400gsm is the working standard. Below that a card bends in a wallet.

The mistake we see most often is a fully laminated or heavily coated letterhead. It looks impressive in the sample and then nobody can write on it. Anything a customer or a member of your team will sign, annotate or stamp wants an uncoated stock. Save gloss, matt and soft-touch finishes for cards and covers. If you want the detail, our guide to paper weights and gsm in printing goes through the ranges properly.

How to order a stationery run without wasting money

Three things decide whether a stationery order is good value.

Order for about a year, not forever. Unit costs drop as quantity rises, which tempts people into five-year quantities. Then the mobile number changes, or you move premises, and the savings evaporate. A year is long enough to get the price benefit and short enough to absorb a change.

Print the whole set together. Colour matching across separate runs on different stocks is harder than people expect. If the letterhead, slips and cards are produced together from one set of files, they will look like a set. Ordered piecemeal over eighteen months, they often will not.

Send proper artwork. This is where most delays come from. Supply a print-ready PDF with fonts embedded, images at print resolution and the right bleed. Our guide to what to send your printer covers exactly what a usable file looks like, and it will save you a round of emails.

One more piece of advice that costs nothing: proofread the contact details twice, out loud, from the proof rather than from the original file. A transposed digit in a phone number is the single most expensive typo in print, because it makes the whole run useless.

Frequently asked questions about business stationery printing

What counts as business stationery?

Business stationery is the set of printed items a business uses in day-to-day correspondence and trading: letterheads, business cards, compliment slips, envelopes, document folders and multi-part forms. It is distinct from marketing print such as leaflets, brochures and banners, which is produced for a campaign rather than for ongoing use.

What size is a UK letterhead?

A4 is the standard, at 210mm by 297mm. It is part of the A-series defined by ISO 216 and is the size every UK envelope, folder and office printer is built around. Using a non-standard size creates compatibility problems with envelopes and franking equipment that rarely justify the visual difference.

How much business stationery should I order at once?

Roughly a year’s supply. Unit prices fall as quantities rise, but so does the chance that a detail on the print becomes out of date before the box is empty. A year balances the two. If you are about to move premises or change a phone number, order less and reprint after.

Does my stationery need to match?

It should look like it came from the same business, which mostly means consistent colour, typeface and logo placement. The most reliable way to achieve that is to print the whole set in one run from one set of files, rather than adding items one at a time over a long period on different paper stocks.