Schedule and email reports

The one-click reports in the PaperCut NG/MF 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/MF 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:

• Sending a department manager a summary of the department staff’s printing.
• Sending a teacher a summary of printing for each student in their class.
• Producing and using a CSV report saved to disk to import into an external system, such as an accounting package.
• Producing a regular report for billing or invoicing purposes.

Scheduling a report

To view the scheduled reports page:

1. Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
   The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.

To create a scheduled report, select the desired report options; then click Add.

Creating scheduled reports (video demo)

Example 1: Emailing shared account usage reports to a department head

It’s very common that print summary reports are emailed to managers in businesses or deans of a particular department/faculty in education. PaperCut provides the facility of emailing reports based on shared account usage to faculty/department head. Filters are available in PaperCut which allows reports to be generated according to the shared account name. Filter can be set by adding the shared account name under Reports → Schedule / Email Reports → Schedule a new report. (E.g. sending Science department head a printing summary report of all the users in the Science department). Setting up the right filter is really important for emailing the desired report.

In a school there are 16 teachers, 4 departments and 4 teachers in each department and one of the teachers in each department is the head of the department. Departments are: Science, English, Maths, Hindi. If printing needs to be monitored in all the 4 departments then 4 accounts will be set up in PaperCut ( i.e. Science, English, Maths, Hindi).

To set up a report that is automatically send to each department head summarizing printing against their department account use the following procedure:

First we will set up the weekly reports for Science department

1. Make sure the Email Options under Options→ Notifications are configured.
2. Schedule these reports from Reports → Schedule / Email Reports → Schedule a new report.
   1. Under shared account reports select the “Shared account printing-User summary”
   2. Add the shared account name as Science.
   3. It is recommended to change the title of the report to something like “Science department Weekly Print Report”.
   4. Select the format of report (E.g. PDF).
   5. Select weekly under Report field.
   6. Select By email under Delivery field.
   7. Add the Science department head’s Email address under Email address field.

Repeat the procedure for all the different departments.

Example 2: 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:

1. Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
   The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
2. In Type, select Shared account printing - user summary.
3. Change the report title to “Science Faculty Account Printing”.
4. In Optional parameters > Shared account name, enter Joe’s faculty shared account name, Science.
5. Leave the report Format as PDF.
6. Make the report deliverable every week by setting Report to Weekly.
7. Set the Delivery to By email.
8. Enter Joe’s email address under Recipients.
9. 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 3: 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:

1. Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
   The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
2. In Type, select Group printing - printer summary.
3. In Optional parameters > Group name, enter Mary’s division group name, Marketing.
4. Leave the report Format as PDF.
5. Make the report deliverable every fortnight by setting Report to Fortnightly.
6. Set the Delivery to By email.
7. Enter Mary’s email under Recipients.
8. 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 4: Create reports to import into an 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.

1. Select Reports > Schedule /Email Reports.
   The Schedule / Email Reports page is displayed.
2. In Type, select Shared account printing - summary .
3. In Optional parameters > Invoiced , select Invoiced.
4. Change the report Format to CSV.
5. Make the report deliverable every week by setting Report to Weekly.
6. Set the Delivery to To file.
7. Enter a file name client-summary. This is the name under which the file is saved on the disk.
8. Click Add.

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, as specified in the Report field, determines when the report will run. If the report includes date based usage information (such as printing usage), the period also determines the date range of the data. The default report delivery times are described in the table below, however, you can change the date on which the first report (and therefore all subsequent reports) will be run using the Config Editor. Fore more information, see Advanced reporting options .

Scheduled reports delivery times