How does your establishment handle printing and charging?

[Olliesaurus]

How do you all go about handling and charging printing?

 

As a single school we had charging down, now we have more schools and they all charge differently.

 

Understandably no one school is the same, we currently use Papercut across the Trust, looking to put (or try) a more uniform charging across the schools to try help the ever thinning finance staff!

[Wubbalubbadub]

At my old school. Heads of department would request an allowance on there papercut department account. Ie, finance would take out £500 from the departments budget. We would then add £500 of papercut credit.

 

At my current school, On the 1st of the month, the current debits balance is sent to finance, resources and myself via an automated email. I then check that im happy with the balances etc, before running a bulk action on all the accounts to reset them to £0.

 

Finance then take out the amounts from the departments budgets. I have found that letting them into debit, just removes the awkward conversation with the teachers who dont have budget authority, who want to add £1000 to the departments account.

 

Works pretty well so far. The only thing i would love to change, would be the automation for the bulk account reset. However i have been told that this isn't possible! Unless someone is a papercut wizard out there, who can prove them wrong?

[mrbios]

Every student gets £3 in credit on papercut each month. Staff are unlimited.

 

All printers are charged at the cost per print + the cost per sheet of A4 paper (or A3). There's no discounts applied for duplexing, as we like to try and build a small surplus, but that's not common knowledge to staff.

 

Finance team charges each department at the end of each month, and charges us for the students prints. Every department head receives a summary of their departments printing costs from papercut at the start of each month too.

[2ilent8cho]

We do not charge departments or have printer credits, if people need to print or photocopy then they do so.

[Wubbalubbadub]

We do not charge departments or have printer credits, if people need to print or photocopy then they do so.

 

Wow...

[MartinT]

We use PaperCut. Students are given a reasonable amount of credit at the start of the year. If they run out, they can buy more and that is put on the school bill as a recharge.

 

Staff are given a reasonable amount of credit at the start of the year. Their usage is recharged to their cost centre each term. If they run out, they must ask the bursar for more credit, which is recharged against their cost centre and subtracts from budget allocated for other costs. In other words, the bursar punishes those who overspend by reducing what else they can buy (books etc.)

 

We have developed this process over a couple of years to reduce the huge amount of wastage by both students and staff. I have also enabled print-on-collect at all the copiers to further reduce wastage from uncollected printouts.

[mrbios]

We do not charge departments or have printer credits, if people need to print or photocopy then they do so.

 

Do you have any print management in place at all, even if you don't use the credit system?

[2ilent8cho]

Do you have any print management in place at all, even if you don't use the credit system?

 

No , we did have PCounter years ago but just scrapped it all.

[Katy]

We don't have credits or charging, but we restrict page count per job with papercut (for staff: colour printing, for pupils: all printing) to try and stop jobs that should be going to reprographics.

 

We used to have credits for pupils but we were giving out extras so often it was just not worth the time, and when they come saying they need more for "art coursework" - how are we to know who takes art? They pay enough in fees that I don't really care if the odd pupil runs up £10 of printing occasionally.

[Rob_D]

Students get something like £1.00 a day printer credit (but teachers can override and charge to their CA if required).

 

Staff all charge printing and copying to a CA/department/activity. Then at the end of the financial year printing debt is paid off from the relevant budgets and the accounts are zeroed out (much the same as MJTayloronline, only yearly instead of monthly).

CA/department heads get weekly/monthly/termly reports of printing in their area (depending on their preference).

 

It's been this way since before I started here and we don't get any complaints from the staff.

[FragglePete]

PaperCut - using AD Groups we can control which account Staff can charge printing and copying too. We run at report at the end of each month which is used to charge back from each faculty. Some faculties have asked for a restriction in place - so when they spend up to a set amount it blocks being able to print / copy to that account.

 

Sixth Forms students get a £10 allowance at the start of their time with us - beyond that they can buy top up cards from finance which they can then charge to their account. Only really have had a couple of students in the 2 years they are here use this facility.

 

Rest of the school can't print unless they obtain a print code from the teacher - these codes change on the hour, every hour and are accessible by staff from a specific internal website. Thanks to @MicrodigitUK for that bit of code that outputs the codes to a JSON file. Each code is for a student account on each faculty which also gets charged back. We produce in depth reports only on request but do a monthly summary for the finance team.

 

We've also setup the Web Cashier feature in PaperCut that the resource technician loves - it's like a mini shop where she supplies things like glue sticks, laminating, white board pens, etc and charges these back the faculties.

 

Has helped reduce our printing costs but even still we're charging back nearly £30k of print costs each year at the moment.

 

Pete

[mdrabble]

We use PaperCut - using AD Groups for Staff and charged against departments for printing and copying.

 

I run automated reports at the end of each month which go to head of department and finance for charge backs and so Heads of Department can see where their budgets are going.

 

Printing for departments is subsidised which means they pay just less than 1p per sheet of A4 (0.008p) (which I think is wrong but I just do as I am told!)

 

All students get 50p per week - Student printing covered by the school. - Student have their own papercut 6 figure ID code to release their own jobs.

 

If student require extra they can pay whatever amount they they want adding. (this tends to be sixth students printing mock exam papers at revision times)

[Reverend_Dan]

We do not charge departments or have printer credits, if people need to print or photocopy then they do so.

 

We are the same (medium sized secondary) for what it was costing in time, management and annoyance for print systems it wasn't worth it, Students can only print in photography and graphics suites. All printing is through MFDs placed around the building.

[AJWhite1970]

We don't charge for printing but we do use PaperCut for monitoring what is happening and for keeping sensible usage limits on Lower School/Middle School printing.

 

TBF, none of my lot abuse printing, it's mostly the girls who come in from the school up the road as their printing is so locked down up there you wouldn't believe the hoops they jump through just to print one piece of A4 whereas down here you just click "Print"....

[Stevecee]

We use Papercut and like others sync to AD Groups. Our balances are reset each week, Teachers get £10 TAs £8, these do not get charged back to any budgets but do serve to a reminder to think before printing. if they run out they have to ask me for more - Policy is to say yes, but I have spoken to people who repeatedly print more than their allocation.

 

Steve

[KevinB]

Like many, we use Papercut with AD and give our students an allowance per half term; £3 for KS3/4, £5 for post-16, more for specialist needs e.g. photography. If they use that up they have to ask a teacher to raise a helpdesk ticket asking for more, figuring that most staff will challenge them on why they have used up their allowance. Staff are unlimited and all printing/copying they do is charged to their department via Papercut.