How do you manage print credits?

[SteveB_NI]

Could I ask a nosey question please & have a brief summary of the current print credit policy in each of your schools?

 

At present, printing credits are assigned & topped up for both staff + students as required. No charge is made to students, and no deductions from departmental budgets for staff credits.

 

They have to budget from their departments for photocopying credits, so the problem is now that printing is seen as "free" and copying is seen as chargeable.

 

I would like to implement a system where each staff member picks the department they are printing for - i.e. some teachers teach 3 subjects so they would choose the department category in paper cut which relates to their print out.

 

I'm hoping to have a management meeting soon so practices from other schools would be a good benchmark.

 

Thanks!

[6Foot2]

Staff: Printing monitored and charged to budgets/departments.

 

Students:

 

Lower school: Printing monitored. Student allocation: £5.00. Students are not charged for this credit but this may change shortly as we are looking at charging lower school students for A3/A4 colour printing [They currently have no access to colour printing. If it is required they do it at home or it is handled by Reprographics]

 

Upper school Printing monitored. Students charge their smart cards with credit [Typically £ 5.00 but can be more]

 

Printing monitoring by: PaperCut.

[rich_tech]

We use Pcounter in our school for this purpose, it gives them a popup when printing to choose their department, which then gets billed internally for their printing for Staff, they also choose a department when logging onto the MFD for their photocopying.

 

Pupils : they have a set amount of credit each month to prevent them doing daft things like printing a university prospectus out (happened in the past I was told) and we just top them up accordingly.

Edited March 3, 2016 by rich_tech

[Narwhal]

We use PaperCut and we allocate all students an amount each week that they can top up for free if they come and ask (but we will look at the legitimacy of what they have already printed) this is budgeted for centrally.

Staff charge their printing and copying to their departments as you have suggested. Most departments give teachers free reign to charge as much as they but we do have one department that restricts how much each person can charge per term. We charge different amounts for different printers too depending on how much the device costs the school.

[unixman_again]

We used to use PCounter but moved to PaperCut when we switched printer supplier. PaperCut is more comprehensive than Pcounter. Of course, with comprehensiveness comes complexity.

 

Students are allocated an amount of money at the start of the year. Art/graphics students get a larger credit. When they run out, they can pay for extra. (This works well.)

 

Staff are allocated an amount too. When they run out they can ask for more and it is automatically granted. When we switched to PaperCut, the idea was to reduce staff printing. When they ran out, staff were supposed to go and plead their case for more credit to SMT. SMT quickly became disinterested and so the whole staff printer monitoring system is a joke and printing has increased this year by a huge amount. The new printer company charge us about 50% less per sheet but the overall printing costs have increased by about 30% (I think.)

[clockend25]

Staff print to faculty/department accounts, but we don't do any kind of internal charging or invoicing of faculties. We just monitor and restrict, for example, access to colour printing.

 

Students are given allowances: KS3 get £0.30 a term, while KS4 and sixth form get there's upfront for the year ranging between £4/£4.50 in credit. Students don't have access to colour printing and instead we bulk print work through reprographics as requested by teachers.

[mikkydoos]

We do...

 

PaperCut

 

£5.00 / week for staff

£3.00 / week for pupils

 

10p per A4 Colour

0.5p per A4 Mono

 

All prints (except pupil laser printers) are queued and collected at a copier. No print = no charge.

[KibosJ]

We use Papercut and apply a weekly limit for students that can be topped up if needed for free.

 

Staff all print to the department they need and these departments are then billed from their budgets.

[CamelMan]

We do -

 

Staff: Departmental billing, quarterly reports run and charged

Students: Allocated £5.00 at the start topped up again to £5.00 at 6th Form. Can come to me for additional if need where I just make sure they havent printed out rubbish (or CV's).

 

All in Papercut Colour - 6p, Mono 2p

[MatthewL]

PaperCut will do everything you need and more, can even use it to monitor printing on network printers too. Personally I would not touch PCounter as its not a patch on PaperCut.

 

Everything can be automated within PaperCut regarding quotas and if it cannot do it on the webpage it can be scheduled using a script and windows task scheduler. It fully integrates with AD, a small MSI is deployed to the PC and you can select which account or sub account you want to print to.

 

There is full logging and also reports can be scheduled and say for example Head of Maths can receive a report showing what their account and who has done what then allowing them to manage the budget and they can sort the staff out that are using all their money.

 

Any queries re PaperCut feel free to drop me a message.

[Julian]

Papercut MF, with "Follow-Me" printing, also charging for photocopying.

 

Pupils get a weekly allowance.

 

Staff select which department will get billed. Heads of department get weekly email, with a breakdown of costs (automatically generated).

 

Finance department gets a monthly list of the costs for each cost centre / year group (automatically generated).

 

AD groups are used allocate teachers to cost centres, which make management easy.

[mikkydoos]

If you havent already got it, basically what you need are:

 

Supported networked copiers with touch display.

Papercut/whatever installed on your print server

Print client on your PC's

 

We get our PaperCut via our photocopier company - this includes product support and upgrades.

We also have a Mac mini running a 2nd PaperCut server for Ipads / Apple devices.

 

I'd advise that a good time to implement managed printing is when your copiers come up for renewal.

Edited March 4, 2016 by mikkydoos