Papercut software - A missing piece

[john_sound1]

Hi all,

 

I’m gathering peoples thoughts on the use of papercut, on one specific issue I have found recently.

 

We are a school and have setup all departments with an 'account'. Users are either assigned to one shared 'account' or are allowed to choose from a list of accounts they are allowed to apply charges to. all print and copy jobs are charged to the relevant account enabling a scheduled report to run, emailing itself to our finance team with the relevant cost charges for each of our Departments (accounts). Additionally, webcashier is used to log special purchases such as reams of paper, laminating, binding, card etc. This has worked great until recently we have found an issue and papercut do not have a feature for this. Our reprographics lady accidently charged 100 reams of A3 coloured paper at a cost of £850 to a department instead of 100 single sheets of A3 coloured paper which would should have cost £1.70! We are all human and make mistakes. I happily went to assist and show here how to use the 'refund' option in webcashier > transaction history, to find there is no option. This is an option in the main papercut print / copy software yet not in the webcashier side of the program. I then went to webcashier > deposits and realised I can 'deposit' back to a user which shows in the logs but not to an 'account'. Whilst I have a work around, I feel it’s short sighted of papercut to not include this feature. I have been in contact with them and they say it’s not got enough requests to make the addition. They have said if i can provide evidence of others having the same issue or others are willing to contact papercut and raise the same feature request, then it will accelerate the option being developed, instead of being shelved.

 

What are your thoughts? Have you had the same issue?

[gaz350b]

Can’t test it but can you put an item with negative cost and then issue that in the webcashier.

[john_sound1]

Thanks gaz350b for your suggestion but I have tried this and negative values are not allowed. if they were, id create a 'purchase' to reflect the 'refund' amount which would work, not forgetting to zero it once the transaction is made. I just find it short sighted for this feature to not be added. You can deposit to an individual user in the webcashier page but not to an account. I am debating the pros and cons to move to equitrac (other vendors are a consideration! haha).

[DGardiner]

cant you just connect to the database and remove the transactions you dont want? bit of a pain but if its a one off

[john_sound1]

Good morning DGardiner. I’ve been told it could corrupt the database apparently. The work around for now is either get our finance team to do an adjustment to the effected departments, currently 4 or I add a line in the report to reflect a refund. It’s not the first time a department has been charged by mistake.

This brings the second issue. When running the report for the webcashier purchases which is a separate report, it does not summarise all accounts but gives you a list of all of the purchases, line by line. I have made a simple excel template, which I can copy the ‘raw’ report data into and this creates the department totals for me. The advantage is I can add a ‘minus’ line as though I have made a refund but the point of the software was to reduce admin time. It feels so close yet so far in ways and these minor niggles are bugging me. We have a technicians meeting for the borough soon, which this is going to be discussed. In particular, the companies lack of support unless a ‘significant number of requests’ for a feature are made, to be added.

I’m curious to know if anyone else has had this issue or if our school is ‘unique’.

[PotNoodleTech]

These kind of mistakes happen occasionally, when it does we just credit the Department via Adjustments and Charges and pout a comment in there detailing what/why/who.