Question about PaperCut print charging

[Sokh]

I have a sneaking suspicion that our print server woes are related to PCounter so I've been looking at alternatives and taken a real shine to PaperCut. The charging print costs to a department that's demonstrated in

looks ideal but are you able to have PaperCut just keep track of the spending for the current month rather than subtract it from an account balance?

 

The way we charge for printing at the moment is toner purchasing comes out the IT support budget then we add up all the printing costs for each department from PCounter and claim the money back off them each term I think. That bits not my job so I can't remember exactly how frequently it happens. I'd rather not make a change to how we do it at the moment, because we all know how much staff love change, so each person or department having a balance won't really work for us.

 

I've just started properly looking into the features today but aside from this it all seems to be spot on for what we need, and I've seen plenty of users recommending it so I'm hoping there's a way to get it behaving how we'd like.

[Edu-IT]

Yes, you can. You can auto charge it to a department. So each of your users could be presented with relevant departments to charge to and then it would be recorded against that. Then you run off reports whenever you like showing those charges.

 

VERY flexible.

 

Edit: They call it shared accounts. http://www.papercut.com/tour/shared-accounts/

Edited March 17, 2015 by Edu-IT

[Sokh]

Thanks for the quick reply!

 

I saw about the shared accounts but judging from the video it looked like it could only subtract the cost from a balance rather than track a running total from the department.

 

Looks like I better fire up the 40 day trial and start working on convincing SLT to change print management.

[Edu-IT]

No, it doesn't. You just set unlimited balance and it goes into a negative.

 

At the end of the period (whenever your finance do the charging) they can just clear off the figure they've charged and it'll adjust. If you don't want to clear it off just leave it running, but, the reports will show the usage for a period you specify the dates for. It's entirely up to you how you choose to do it but it can easily do what you want, and a ton more.

 

Just like this pic shows.

 

 

Edited March 17, 2015 by Edu-IT

[Sokh]

Ah okay that makes sense. That'll do the job just as well.

 

Thanks for your help.