Users in PaperCut have a personal balance used to fund their personal printing. This balance can be treated like a bank account used for printing. When the account is out of credit the user can no longer print until more funds are added to the account. By default users have a single account to store their balance, but this may be too restrictive in some situations. For example, it's often useful to have separate accounts for "free" print quotas and cash payments.
The multiple personal accounts feature discussed in this chapter is an advanced feature that has been carefully architected with the assistance and feedback from leading Universities and Colleges from around the globe.
When multiple personal accounts are enabled, a user has multiple accounts with credit available for printing. Each account is a separate pool of credit that adheres to the following rules:
Credit is deducted from the available funds in the order configured by the administrator.
If the designated account does not have enough credit, the next account in sequence will be used until all of the credit is used.
If a print job costs more than the total credit in all accounts, the job is disallowed.
From the perspective of the end-user little changes when multiple accounts are enabled:
The total balance of all accounts is displayed in the user client, release station, and end-user web interface.
Printing, quotas, TopUp/Pre-Paid Cards and all other PaperCut features work the same with multiple accounts as they do with a single account.
The fact that there are multiple balances can optionally be effectively hidden from the user.
Although the concept of multiple personal accounts is quite simple, the management may be complex depending on implementation. Readers are advised to read this chapter in full and conduction some planning before full deployment. Good print management in large organizations is hard enough, and multiple accounts if not implemented right could make it just that little bit harder!
There are a number of reasons why a site might choose to enable multiple personal accounts, but the most common is the need to separate "free" print quotas from cash payments. Common reasons for considering multiple accounts are:
Many sites such as colleges, schools and universities allow users to pay for printing via TopUp/Pre-Paid Cards or via credit card using a payment gateway like PayPal or Authorize.Net. When cash payments and "free" quota are combined into a single account balance it is not possible to give cash refunds without potentially refunding quota amounts.
Using multiple accounts to separate "quotas" and "cash" has a number of benefits:
Simplified auditing and tracking of cash payments and refunds.
Allows for refunding of unused cash payments at the end of year or enrollment.
Making cash payments does not interfere with "not to exceed" quota thresholds.
This configuration is discussed detail in the section called “Example 1: Separate Cash/Quota Accounts”.
In some more large and complex environments each department or faculty independently manage and control their own printer fleet. In these situations the departments may want to assign a "free" quota to their members/students that should only be used on their own printers. Any "free" quotas allocated from other departments must not be used on this department's printers. If the user adds cash to their account this may be used in any department.
In most environments this configuration is not required because the print policy is managed centrally. This is most useful when implementing a centralised PaperCut installation in an environment where the departments historically had independent control of print policy. Using this configuration can be the first phase in a transition to a fully centralised system.
This is an advanced configuration and is discussed in details in the section called “Example 2: Department/Faculty Quotas (Advanced)”.
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