Choose your language

Choose your login

Contact us

Schedule and email reports

This page applies to:

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.

Usage

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. 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:

  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 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:

  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 3: 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

PeriodReport Run TimeReport Date Range
DailyEarly every morning, about 12:55 am.The previous day.
WeeklyEvery Sunday in the early morning, about 12:55 am.The previous week, from Sunday to Saturday
FortnightlyEvery second Sunday in the early morning, about 12:55 am. 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.
MonthlyEarly morning on the first day of every month, about 12:55 am.The previous month.
QuarterlyEarly morning on the first day of every quarter, about 12:55 am. Each quarter of a year is 3 months long. For example: First quarter of the year is from 1st of January to 31st of March.The previous quarter.
YearlyEarly morning on the first day of every year, about 12:55 amThe previous year.

Comments