The account selection popup is a feature of the User Client that allows allocating printing to shared accounts. There are two types of account selection popup:
Standard account selection popup
The standard account selection popup provides the basic features required to charge to shared accounts. It's ideal for sites with simple account structures.
Advanced account selection popup
The advanced account selection popup includes additional features that are suitable when shared accounts are used frequently, and especially when many shared accounts exist.
Manager mode popup
The manager mode popup is designed for "print managers" that allows charging printing to any user or shared account, and apply adjustments to the job costs (e.g. for charge for special paper, binding, etc). The manager mode popup is often used in print rooms where staff perform printing on behalf of other users.
Automatically charge to a single shared account
This is a special mode that allows automatically charging all printing to a selected shared account, without any user interaction or popup.
The standard account selection popup offers four account selection types:
Charge to personal account.
Charge/allocate to a shared account selected by a PIN.
Charge/allocate to a shared account from list (taking into account security settings).
Perform print as another user (username and password required).
When a user selects a shared account, there is the option to:
Charge the print to a shared account.
Charge the print to personal account (and allocate to shared account for reporting).
The option to charge a to personal account allows printing to be tracked against shared accounts while allowing the use of user-based quotas. When this option is selected, the cost of the print job is deducted from the user's personal account, but the job is allocated against the shared account which allows for account based print reporting.
The Default shared account can be set to speed up the process of selecting a commonly chosen account. When entered the selected account will be pre-selected in account selection popups.
System administrators can control on a per-user basis what options are available in the user's popup.
Note
Changes to the options available in the account selection popup come into effect immediately. There is no need to restart the client software for these settings to take effect.
The Charge to personal account with popup notification option displays a popup with no account selection features. This option is useful in environments where the system administrator desires to provide users with cost confirmation prior to printing.
Tip
To educate the users about the pop-up confirmation window, administrators might find the End-user handout example helpful.
The advanced account selection popup allows charging to personal or shared accounts, and has the following additional features:
A searchable account list
The account list can be searched by the account name or code, making it much easier to find an account when there are many in the list. The search can also be remembered for next time.
Structured account list
The account list is hierarchical; that is, sub-accounts are shown indented from their parent accounts for clarity.
A preferred list of accounts
The most commonly used accounts can be saved to a list. This is a useful feature when many accounts exist, but each user mostly just uses a few of them.
A list of recently selected accounts
The accounts that have been recently selected are saved to a list for quick selection.
Comments on print jobs
The advanced account selection popup allows assigning a comment to a print job for future reference.
Cost Adjustments
Cost adjustments offer the ability to apply various adjustments to the cost of a print job. Adjustments can be a percentage rate, a per job adjustment or a per page adjustment. For example, a 200% adjustment could be defined for manually loading photo paper (charge twice the standard cost). Other common examples of adjustments include; Mylar Film, draft paper, draft printing mode, discounts for "special" customers/jobs, and extra for binding and manual handling. Cost adjustments are defined at either a global or printer level and are documented in detail in the section called “Cost Adjustments”.
Option to not show a print job on invoices
Sometimes there are print jobs that need to be allocated to an account but not appear on any invoice reports. The advanced account selection popup has an option to allocate a 'non invoiceable' print job to an account.
As in the standard account selection popup, there are two charging options for shared accounts:
Charge shared account
Charge personal account (and allocate to shared account for reporting)
The Default shared account can be set to speed up the process of selecting a commonly chosen account. When entered the selected account will be pre-selected in account selection popups.
In a professional (client billing) installation the advanced account selection popup is often enabled for all users, so that every user is prompted for a shared account (client) to charge when printing.
Once the client software is deployed on user workstations (covered in the section called “User Client Deployment”), the account selection popup may be enabled. The popup can be enabled on one user at a time or can be enabled for all users in bulk. To enable the popup for all users in bulk:
Log into the admin interface.
Navigate to → →
By default the action will be applied to all users (the special
[All Users]group). To apply the action to a subset of users (a user group), select that group from the dropdown list.In the section Change settings, enable the option Change account selection setting and select the option Show the advanced account selection popup from the dropdown list.
If you do not want to allow users to charge printing to their personal account (i.e. they must select a shared account) then disable the option Allow user to charge to their personal account.
Press and confirm the operation. Once completed, the selected users will have the account popup enabled.
Once the popup has been enabled on all users some testing should be performed from users' desktops. To test, log into a user workstation, perform a print and confirm that the account popup appears and the job is logged as expected.
The manager mode popup is designed to be used by authorized users to perform printing on behalf of other users (e.g. in a school's print room when jobs are emailed in with often complex instructions such as binding, color paper covers, etc.). The approved user can charge printing to users' personal accounts or any shared account. This popup provides the following features:
Charge printing to any user
The manager enters the user's username or ID number. The printing will be logged under this user's account.
Charging to any account
The print job may be charged from the user's personal printing account or any of the shared accounts in the system. The shared accounts may be selected from a list, or using the account code/PIN.
Standard cost adjustments
Standard cost adjustments provide a list of adjustments that can be applied to the cost of a print job. The print manager can select one or more standard adjustments to apply to a given print job. Adjustments can be a percentage rate, a per job adjustment or a per page adjustment. For example, a 200% adjustment could be defined for manually loading photo paper (charge twice the standard cost). Other common examples of adjustments include; Mylar Film, draft paper, draft printing mode, discounts for "special" customers/jobs, and extra for binding and manual handling. These adjustments can be defined on the server at a global or printer level and are documented in detail in the section called “Cost Adjustments”.
Custom cost adjustments
If none of the standard adjustments are applicable, the print manager can easily apply a custom per page or per job adjustment. Examples could include special binding, delivery, etc.
Comments on print jobs
Allows assigning a comment to a print job for future reference. e.g. to explain the reason for the cost adjustments.
This special account selection mode allows all printing to be automatically charged to a single shared account, without user interaction or the need to run the User Client software on the workstation. This mode is useful when a user will only ever charge printing to a single shared account and does not want the inconvenience of responding the account selection popup then they print.
An example of where this would be useful is in a school or business environment where shared accounts represent a department within the organisation. In this situation user printing should be automatically allocated to a single shared account without any user interaction. Although this can mostly be achieved with the standard account selection popup, it requires the user to respond to each popup when they print.
This option can be selected for an individual user, set on multiple users using the Bulk User Actions or set in the initial user settings in the Group section. Once the Automatically charge to a shared account option is selected, then enter the account name to charge. To select a sub-account the account name must be entered in the parent\sub-account format.
