Print management - Credit allocation?

[eyetea]

In our school (Secondary, Approx 700 pupils) we currently have no print management, but are looking into implementing PaperCut.

 

One of the points we're not overly sure on is the amount of credit to give pupils (and possibly staff!) - our current line of thinking is if we implement PaperCut and monitor it for a period of time, i.e. a term, then try to work out possible credit allocation from the findings.

 

If you run a print management solution could you tell me how much credit you give your users! (And also what it equates to i.e. 1 credit = single greyscale page, 4 credits = full colour page etc)?

 

Cheers!

 

Eyetea

[pcstru]

We give 250 credits to KS3 students, 500 to KS4 per year. Top up credits are 1p each. We charge 1p B&W, 5p Color. We don't give staff any credit - all staff printing is billed to budget holders.

[RichB]

We gave students 10 credits a week (1 credit B&W 3 Colour) which didnt roll over, if the credits were not used they were wiped. Staff had 20 credits a week which rolled over if not used. We charged staff then £20 per 400 credits if they wanted more or wanted to print out students work / coursework.

 

Saved us thousands in a short space of time. Amazing what people actually need to print when they need to think about it. Backing from SLT a must with this kind of project.

 

There are websites out there that will tell you the exact cost per print on a printer and you can use PCounter (only software ive used) to allocate the actual costs to a printer and give "credits" out as money values.

[AJWhite1970]

Staff - £100

Sixth Form Students - £7.50

Middle School - £6.00

Lower School - £2.50

Sixth Form Students visiting from the other school (shared sixth form) - £2.50

 

Costs

 

1 page A4 b/w (single or duplex) 2p

1 page A3 b/w (single or duplex) 4p

1 page A4 colour 10p

1 page A3 colour 20p

 

Works really well and has cut down on the amount of unnecessary printing

Hope this helps

Andrew

[notalot]

Printing for staff is unrestricted however it is recharged back to the departments here.

 

Printing is charged at 3p for mono and 8p for colour

 

Students get 75p per week that is cumulative week by week which is reset yearly.

[AlexB]

I won't mention costs, but just to throw another thought in, we use separate quota for mono and colour. Pupils get x mono per day which resets overnight with extras pages at no cost, but they have to come and ask. x colour per year and they have to pay for any colour they need after that. With papercut you can script what quota any particular printer uses, when I setup originally the default behaviour was to use one quota and then automatically move to the next and we wanted total separation and hence the script (papercut support were great in directing me how to achieve this)

[SovietRussia]

Students - £5 a half-term

Sixth Form - £6 a half-term

Staff - £25 a half-term

Admin/SLT - Unrestricted

 

5p per sheet, 7p in IT rooms, 4p for the Mono Photocopier, 7p for the Colour Photocopiers

 

If anyone needs anymore though, they just ask. But we have found that introducing a balance has DRAMATICALLY reduced printing as people are like "hmm do i have enough to print these 100 pages of the word 'noob'?!"

Edited May 14, 2014 by SovietRussia

[eyetea]

Thanks for all the replies - we're hoping to install PaperCut NG over the half-term break, and then leave it monitoring for the last half term, and then with info in this thread in mind too work out with SLT & Finance what everyones quotas should be!