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Maintaining office/department history

PaperCut maintains a historical record of changes to users' office and department fields. PaperCut cross-references job logs against these histories so that it can report print usage by the office and department a user belonged to at the time they printed a job. Normally this happens in the background so you do not need to know that it is happening.

There are some cases where a user's office or department has been updated incorrectly in the user directory, e.g. updated too late, or changed to the wrong name. These changes reflect how user activity is reported by PaperCut. To ensure that information is reported correctly, you can retrospectively alter changes that were made incorrectly. The most common cases where alteration might be required are described below.

Note:

A user's office and department history are synchronized from the user directory into PaperCut, and not the other way around. Therefore it is important that the details in the user directory are updated before making historical changes in PaperCut. PaperCut automatically synchronizes these details overnight, however, a you can make a change in the same day by running a manual synchronization from Options > User/Group Sync > Synchronize Now .

Scenario 1: Correcting a late change to a user's office or department

User peter moves from the Science department to the Medicine department on 14 May but the user directory is not updated with the change until 27 May. The PaperCut administrator Jane notices that Peter's activity between 14 and 27 May has been incorrectly allocated to his old department, Science. Luckily Jane can alter history, and she does so as follows:

  1. Click the Users tab.

    The User List page is displayed.

  2. Select peter.

  3. In the Other Details area, click View/edit history below Department.

    The Department history screen is displayed, including the department change on the incorrect date of May 27.

  4. Jane finds the row where the department was changed to Medicine on the incorrect date (On 27 May 2011 in the screenshot above), corrects the date; then clicks Apply.

  5. Peter's department change has now been retrospectively updated to 14 May. Reports now show Peter's activity being allocated to the Medicine department after this date.

Scenario - Correcting an unintended office or department change

On April 9 Peter joins the Medicine department. At the time, his department's administrator entered the department name into the user directory as Medical Department, where the correct name should have been Medicine. The PaperCut administrator Jane realizes this mistake on April 28 and updates the user directory.

PaperCut now displays Peter's activity between April 9 and April 28 as being allocated to the incorrect department Medical Department. To correct this, Jane performs the following actions:

  1. Navigates to Users > peter.

  2. Clicks View/edit history below Department.

  3. The department history screen is displayed, and shows the incorrect department change on April 9.

  4. Jane clicks the delete link in the row of the incorrect department change Medical Department.

  5. The incorrect department change has now been deleted, leaving the new department Medicine as active since April 28.

  6. Jane updates the change date of the Medicine department to April 9; then clicks OK.

  7. Reports now consider Medicine as Peter's department since April 9, and the incorrect entry Medical Department has been deleted.