Scheduling and emailing reports
The one-click reports in the PaperCut NG web interface are good for finding important data fast, however, sometimes it is more convenient to have important data 'pushed' to interested parties. You can achieve this with scheduled reports.
PaperCut NG can schedule reports to run periodically and have them automatically sent out via email or saved to a folder. You can schedule reports for a variety of purposes, for example:
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Sending a department manager a summary of the department staff's printing.
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Sending a teacher a summary of printing for each student in their class.
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Producing and using a CSV report saved to disk to import into an external system, such as an accounting package.
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Producing a regular report for billing or invoicing purposes.
Usage
To view the scheduled reports page:
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Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
Before scheduled reports can be sent via email, PaperCut NG needs to know where to find a SMTPSimple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the mechanism by which an email client program sends emails to an outgoing mail server (SMTP server) for delivery to the intended email address. server (outgoing email server). For information about how to configure email notifications, see Configuring Email Notifications.
To create a scheduled report, select the desired report options; then click Add. The process is best described by way of example:
Example 1: Faculty based reporting in education
Joe is head of the science faculty at a university. Faculty staff have the ability to charge printing back to the faculty. Joe wants to see, on a regular basis, how much printing each user charges to the faculty.
To do this:
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Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
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In Type, select Shared account printing - user summary.
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In Optional parameters > Account name , enter Joe's faculty shared accountA shared account is an account that is shared by multiple users. For example, in business, shared accounts can be used to track printing costs by business unit, project, or client. Organizations like legal firms, engineering firms, or accounting offices often have long lists of accounts, projects, clients, or matters. In a school or university, shared accounts can be used to track printing by departments, classes, or subjects. name, Science.
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Change the report title to "Science Faculty Account Printing".
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Leave the report Format as PDF.
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Make the report deliverable every week by setting Report to Weekly.
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Set the Delivery to By email.
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Enter Joe's email address under Recipients.
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Click Add.
The report is now scheduled to run every week, and should now be shown in the table on the bottom of the page. Joe will receive an email every Sunday showing the previous week's printing in his faculty. To find out exactly when the report will be sent, see Details. To see an example of what the report will look like, click [show example] next to the report. To manually run the report (generate it and email to Joe now), click [run now]. The
The [run now] operation also provides a convenient way to resend the previous period's report if the original delivery failed or if the email was accidentally deleted.
Example 2: Division based reporting in business
Mary is head of the marketing division at a company. She wants to see which printers her staff use most, to make decisions about printer redistribution and purchasing. Also of interest are the sizes of paper being used, and how much color printing is being performed.
To do this:
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Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
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In Type, select Group printing - printer summary.
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In Optional parameters > Group name, enter Mary's division group name, Marketing.
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Leave the report Format as PDF.
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Make the report deliverable every fortnight by setting Report to Fortnightly.
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Set the Delivery to By email.
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Enter Mary's email under Recipients.
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Click Add.
The report is now scheduled to run every fortnight, and should now be shown in the table below. Mary will receive an email every second Sunday showing the previous fortnight's printer usage by her division.
Example 3: Create reports to import into external system
John is the head of the accounting department in the organization and wants to charge his clients for invoiced printing allocated to their account. He wants that data in the external accounting system. He can schedule shared account printing - summary report to be saved to disk so that he can access the same file periodically and import the data into his external system.
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Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
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In Type, select Shared account printing - summary .
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In Optional parameters > Invoiced , select, yes.
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Change the report Format to CSV.
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Make the report deliverable every week by setting Report to Weekly.
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Set the Delivery to To file.
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Enter a file name client-summary. This is the name under which the file is saved on the disk.
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Click Add.
Selecting Append datestamp to file name is optional. If the option is selected, then the report is saved with a unique name, including the date every time, otherwise the report is overwritten periodically.
The report is now scheduled to be written to disk every week, and should be shown in the table below. A new report is generated under the name of client-summary.csv, every week under [app-path]/server/data/scheduled-reports.
Details
Each report Period determines when the report will run. When the report includes date based usage information (such as printing usage), the period also determines the date range of the data to include.
| Period | Report Run Time | Report Date Range |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Early every morning, about 12:55am. | The previous day. |
| Weekly | Every Sunday in the early morning, about 12:55am. | The previous week, from Sunday to Saturday |
| Fortnightly | Every second Sunday in the early morning, about 12:55am. Fortnightly reports are run on even weeks, i.e. the second week of the year, the fourth week of the year, etc. | The previous fortnight, from two Sundays ago to Saturday. |
| Monthly | Early morning on the first day of every month, about 12:55am. | The previous month. |
| Quarterly | Early morning on the first day of every quarter, about 12:55am. Each quarter of an year is 3 months long. For example: First quarter of the year is from 1st of January to 30th of March. | The previous quarter. |
| Yearly | Early morning on the first day of every year , about 12:55am | The previous year. |
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Reports scheduled to write to a file are always written to a folder on the server located at [app-path]/server/data/scheduled-reports. This is a local folder on the server where PaperCut NG is installed. It is not possible to change this target location to point to say a network share on another system. The reason for this is that PaperCut runs as a system service/daemon with limited rights so it does not have access to other locations/servers. If the file needs to be accessible/consumed from another system, consider sharing the target folder, or using a scheduled task running as a privileged user (e.g. Windows Task or Cron job) to copy the file.
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If a user has their email address set in PaperCut NG, you can enter their username in Recipients instead. For example, instead of entering [email protected], enter just joe.