pCounter Reporting v Konica Bills

[garethedmondson]

Evening,

We are seeing a weird discrepancy in our billing in school in regards to pCounter and the bills provided by Konica Minolta.

Every quarter the school Librarian sends a counter reading to Konica. One reading for colour and one for black only. This works for her and she does it religiously.

I have come across this issue today when looking into our copying (I've been asked to do it by the Deputy).

Here is an example.

We received a QTRly bill from KM dated 02/01/2011 - 02/04/2011. The information was: Black - 151,480 and Colour 19,675

The bill has been paid as at that time we had no reason to doubt anything.

I've just run the same billing period in pCounter and this is what I was shown: Black - 136,512 and Colour 21,813. As you can see some major discrepancy there. I've done the same thing for QTR2 and 3 as well as running the bills against the current billing period up to today. They all report different to what the Konica machines are showing.

What am I missing? I cannot get any of the figures to add up. At all. Am I reporting correctly?

Any advice appreciated,

Gareth

[ZeroHour]

Is there anything in place to stop people finding the printers direct rather then through your print server?

[glennda]

Pcounter is not reporting print jobs rather the pages?

Does Pcounter count the photocopying sheets aswell as the printer?

[plexer]

As above if it's a copier as well pcounter won't be tracking the off glass copies will it?

Ben

[garethedmondson]

Hi Guys,

@ZeroHour - No. We have set up GPOs to stop people accessing or installing printers.

@glennda and @plexer - Good point but we have pCounter Embedded on each of our copiers which means if a user goes to make a photocopy they have to log into the copier. This then gets billed to their department. Each Head of Department gets a breakdown during the internal monthly billing period.

pCounter lets us create different types of report based on criteria we set. We have it set at the moment to show all clicks and then break them down into black and colour.

Thanks guys for the thoughts.

Gareth

[Big_Ted]

perhaps faxing and scanning have been included in the count?

Do those figures come from KM or from the Librarian? can you check the counters on the KM your self via the web admin UI for the KM?

How do both systems count duplex and NUP printing?

[plexer]

Fair enough it is strange.

Ben

[ZeroHour]

@ZeroHour - No. We have set up GPOs to stop people accessing or installing printers.

Is there a firewall onboard? Is is possible someone with a laptop is plugging in and detecting them? I would set the printer firewall to only allow your admin servers ip range to talk direct.

[garethedmondson]

I'll check everything tomorrow again. I'm going to vpn in later to get the reports for different printers and update my costing spreadsheet. This is only with one copier. I've not looked at how the others are. Konica are coming out next Wednesday to look at pCounter. I'm also going to log a call with them.

Cheers everyone,

Gareth

[glennda]

@big_ted could be onto something there, you may find that PCounter is counting duplex jobs as a single page (as its 1 physical piece of paper) where as KM are counting the prints as its using toner for 2 sides?

Would be interesting to get the answer as we are going to be doing this with Papercut in the near future.

[plexer]

Konica got anything to say about this?

Ben

[glennda]

Konica got anything to say about this?

Ben

hes got them coming in next week to look.

[garethedmondson]

I just cannot work this all out. It's driving me mad. Some quarters we are showing more than Konica and other days they are showing more than us.

I've just checked our bills and one printer is showing 21135 between 1 Nov and 17 Nov.

pCounter is telling us we've actually done 28511 - a difference of 7376. Yes we benefit from that but I cannot find that figure anywhere. I cannot even work out whether it id duplexed or not.

I'm tired now and have seen figures all night.

I just do not know.

Gareth

[glennda]

I know this sound stupid but does it even itself out over a large period of time?

I used to get it with Tills (maybe not quite so high tech) But sometimes they would be £100/200 over (we are talking on 7k going though it) or sometimes they would be £100/200 under. But over a period of say a week it actually evened itself out! (might just be fluke but it has happened on mulitple occasions on multiple types of tills)

It does sound stupid and not possible but IMHO thats what happened!

[garethedmondson]

believe it or not we thought about this. are the bills an estimate - I phoned KM earlier today and they assure me the bills are accurate given readings.

plus they are too wildly out of sync to be estimates.

I cannot believe their hardware is wrong so it has to be something with pCounter.

Gareth