About quotas, balances, and restrictions

📖 For instructions on how to configure quotas, balances, and restrictions, see Configure quotas, balances, and restrictions .

Printing and the infrastructure required to support it (printer hardware, toner, paper, and the tech who un-jams and maintains the printers) are limited network resources. And as an IT admin, part of your day-to-day is keeping an eye on potential opportunities to save your organization resources and control costs.

Quotas is a PaperCut Hive and Pocket automation. It simplifies print management by letting SysAdmins set a limit to users’ printing and copying, and set how often the limit is automatically assigned — each day, week, month, or year.

With quotas, SysAdmins allocate printing allowances (budgets) to users, monitor usage, and ensure responsible resource use.

Quotas help your users make decisions about what they’re printing and copying, like “Is it worth it?”… “Do I really need it?”. They’re an effective way to reduce and control costs, and promote responsible printer use in a network environment.

Think of quotas as a smart allowance system for printing and copying! They let you set spending limits for your users and groups, just like giving everyone a budget. This encourages users to be more accountable for how many printer resources they use.

Using quotas is a key way to control print usage costs in an organization.

Terminology

Quotas, balances, and restrictions overview

Do you want to stop printer costs from spiralling out of control, limit user printing and copying, and eliminate deliberate waste? Then the Print Quota Control and Copy Quota Control features are your best friends. They keeps users mindful of their printing and copying, and let IT admins manage costs.

Paying for printer usage can be a divisive subject since everyone generally prefers getting stuff for free. However, setting a reasonable print and copy limit can start to make some big savings while giving admins predictability over costs — no more surprises when someone prints 200 vacation photos of their trip to Rio de Janeiro!

Use quotas to set spending limits that work for everyone. PaperCut handles all the tracking automatically, so you can focus on more important things.

Benefits of implementing quotas and restrictions for user accounts

Setting up quotas, balances, and restrictions tackles things like:

• runaway print and copy costs
• unfair and unclear resource sharing and consumption
• paper and toner waste
• environmental problems
• keeping individual printing in check
• “going green” and promoting sustainability
• helping everyone print more responsibly.

Budget superhero powers — Save money and stop budget blowouts before they happen! With quotas in place, you can keep print and copy costs perfectly predictable—no more end-of-month surprises or explaining to finance why the paper bill is through the roof.

Fair share for everyone — Like slicing up a cake, quotas make sure everyone gets their fair portion of printer resources. Set unique allowances for individuals to match specific needs. Mix and match quotas however you want. No more department printer wars or that one person who prints the entire internet.

Automatic cost control — After you set quotas in PaperCut Hive or Pocket, the system automatically keeps end-user spending in check. Quotas can be automatically reset daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or at any time you choose. It’s like having an accountant watch every user and printer.

Better printer habits — When users can see their balance ticking down, they think twice about printing that 100-page PDF. Watch how quickly people discover the preview button when they have a quota. You’ll significantly reduce unnecessary printing and copying, cut costs, and save resources. Plus, no more “but I didn’t know I was out of credit!” Users can check their balance anytime in their User Portal.

Environmental high-five — Less unnecessary printing means happy trees. Quotas naturally encourage people to think before they print or copy, leading to less waste and a greener organization.

And you can get creative; boost the benefits of using quotas with extra messaging and initiatives! Here are some interesting ideas that some of our business customers have adopted over the years when using quotas.

• Empower employees on how to spend all the money saved by using quotas. Print budgets were compared one year to another, and the entire year of savings was spent on the IT systems of their choice. This helped smooth the transition on an aggressive IT policy.
• A large business combined the environmental impact message with cost savings, both internally in the staff newsletters and externally in the shareholders’ prospectus, to create a win-win message for the business and the environment. (And make the IT department look like heroes.)
• Mix your cost-saving message with an environmental message. The WWF has a great office printing environmental impact guide .

Example customer scenarios and outcomes

Here are some examples of customer journeys, scenarios, and triggers for various organizations and business sectors to give you a broad overview of how you might use quotas.

Common cost control scenario — set an account balance

The most common way to implement quotas is to set an account balance for each user and consider that balance as the user’s print and copy quota (limit). Then, set up PaperCut to restrict the user from starting any print or copy jobs when there aren’t enough funds in the account to cover the job cost.

Then, when the user tries to start the job, they will see a print denial message informing them they don’t have sufficient funds.

Common budgeting and reporting scenario — schedule quotas

You can also schedule quotas, which regularly deposit money or credit into the user accounts. You can do this for restricted and unrestricted accounts.

In this scenario, for accounting and reporting purposes you set a periodic quota for all users, for example, $100 a month as a target budget. You then track negative balances in the Users list to find out who is printing and copying more than the budgeted amount.

Education scenarios

One particular sector that benefits from quotas is education. By implementing quotas or charging, the old adage “if you give a student something for free, they will use it” becomes a thing of the past.

It’s been proven that many PaperCut educational customers have reduced their printer costs by up to 75%. So, it’s worth exploring these features more.

• In K12s, quotas are really powerful as they teach students responsibility and the value of money. It’s amazing how quickly students adopt black and white printing and copying when they are restricted to a quota.

• Most educational organizations implement a “use it or lose it” time-based quota policy. This prevents funds banking up and large volumes at the end of the year.

Education scenarios

• A school wants to stick to a print budget, see which students and staff print or copy the most, and review if usage could be minimized.

• A school needs to manage high-volume printing in a dedicated print room (reprographic room/copier room).

• A university resets student quotas each semester.

• A high school gives teachers unlimited balance but restricts student usage.

• A K-12 school tracks and reports on student usage and teacher/staff usage.

Education outcomes

• Stop users from printing and copying excessively and improve their print behavior by setting up time-based student quotas.

• Keep users mindful of their print and copy usage.

• Stop students from printing and copying too much unnecessarily.

• Stop contractors and outside agencies from over-using school print infrastructure.

• Top up a student’s quota if a student exceeds their quota and requests a top-up—just add funds through the PaperCut Hive or Pocket admin console.

• Allocate a fixed monthly allowance to each teacher for classroom materials. Any overuse requires approval from the admin.

• Give students a monthly quota. If they exceed their quota, they have to top up their balance using personal funds by going to a student services counter.

Example implementation cues

• Start of a new academic year, semester, or term.

• Student print and copy usage abuse.

• Budget constraints.

Healthcare scenarios

Healthcare scenarios

• A medical office separates prescription printing from general printing.
• A clinic tracks printing costs per practitioner.
• A hospital manages printing budgets across different wards.

Healthcare outcomes

• Set different quotas for administrative versus medical staff.
• Manage secure printing budgets.
• Track costs per department.

Example implementation cues

• Compliance requirements.
• Cost allocation needs.
• Department budget management.

Large organizations scenarios

Large organizations scenarios

• Operational offices spread across the country, disconnected from the main office (absolutely out of control).

• A government department must ensure printer costs stay within fiscal year budgets.

Large organizations outcomes

• Complete control of printing copying and scanning activities, even from locations not directly connected.

• Bulk actions are used to select multiple users for one-off actions, like giving a set of users additional money, for example, to print for a company event.

Example implementation cues

• Cost reduction initiatives.

• New environmental sustainability goals.

• Raising user awareness of both costs and environmental impact.

Small and medium sized businesses (SMB) scenarios

SMB scenarios

• Keep track of users even without a domain control.
• Enable guest users to print under control.

SMB outcomes

• Set simple quotas for all staff in a real estate business.
• Create special allowances for the marketing staff.
• Create a quota for a guest user.
• Leave the accounting office free (they already have other problems to deal with!)

Example implementation cues

• Growing printing costs.
• Limited printer resources.
• Staff printing large and/or expensive non-work related documents.

Best practices

You can find a ton of guidance for best practices in the Top 10 best practices for implementing Quotas in education article. Relevant for both PaperCut Hive and PaperCut MF.

Quotas in detail

• How job costs and quotas are related
• Why use quotas over other methods of limiting print and copy usage?
• Automatically updating user accounts (quota schedules)
• Ways of monitoring costs without quotas

How job costs and quotas are related

Before you set up quotas you need to set up Cost Tracking and per-page job costs. That’s because setting job costs is imperative for quotas work.

Print job process:

1. A user prints a job.
2. The user goes to release the job.
3. Before releasing the job, PaperCut Hive or Pocket checks the job’s cost (calculated by the per-page costs configured for the printer in Cost Tracking) against the user’s balance.
4. If the job’s cost is less than the available balance (or overdraft limit), the job is released; otherwise the job is blocked from release until the user’s balance is increased.

Copy job process:

1. A user logs into a printer via the embedded application.
2. They select Access Device Functions.
3. They then start a copy job.
4. If they have no balance, the copy job will not start. If they have a balance, the copier will keep track of the cost in real time. Once the balance reaches zero, the job will stop — but based on a number of factors, there may be some overrun of pages before the job fully stops.

Why use quotas over other methods of limiting print and copy usage?

By tying print and copying to a monetary balance, an organization can precisely manage, and have predictability over, printer or MFD expenses, making it easy to budget while preventing overspending and waste.

A quota system makes users more aware of the cost of printing and copying. When they have a limited budget, they are more likely to think before they start, reducing unnecessary jobs and promoting responsible print and copy habits. This can significantly reduce overall printer usage, which also helps the environment.

Quotas offer great flexibility. Different users can have different quotas based on their needs. The cost of prints and copies can also be adjusted as needed, and the system can easily accommodate different paper sizes, color, etc., by assigning appropriate costs to specific printers and MFDs. For example, by setting lower costs per page for duplex, users are encouraged to use double-sided, reducing paper consumption. This behavior incentive wouldn’t be available on a page-based quota system.

PaperCut automates the process of tracking and enforcing limits. After the quotas are set, the software handles the rest, reducing the need for SysAdmins to manually monitor and intervene. This saves time and resources.

Users can see their balance in their User Portal and understand the cost of each print job. This transparency can reduce complaints and improve user satisfaction.

Automatically updating user accounts (quota schedules)

You can schedule a quota, that is, set a regular automatic credit deposit into user accounts.

You can also schedule to reset the balance to a specific amount, or subtract an amount from the balance.

Scheduling can only be done via user groups. For instructions, see Schedule a recurring quota for a user group .

All users in that group will have their balance adjusted according to the action chosen in the quota schedule.

Ways of monitoring costs without quotas

An organization might not want to use quotas to manage user balances and restrict users, but still want to track the cost of print and copy jobs. In this case they can simply use PaperCut Hive’s Cost Tracking feature, which gives users unrestricted printing but monitors it all.

This is a common scenario in commercial organizations. Because PaperCut Hive allows organizations to create different cost profiles and assign them to different printers, Cost Tracking helps with financial planning and budgeting.

Restrictions in detail

• “Restricted” accounts stop users from starting a job based on the balance
• When and why to use Restricted and Unrestricted accounts
• Differences between restricting print/copy jobs and scan/fax jobs
• How overdrafts restrict printer usage
• Updating balances and restrictions by using bulk actions
• Users and groups

“Restricted” accounts — stop users from starting a job based on the balance

Restricted is the term for accounts that are set up to stop users from starting jobs when they don’t have sufficient credit in their account to cover the job cost. Users can still submit print jobs to the PaperCut Printer regardless of their balance, but they won’t print until there is enough balance.

Restricting print jobs applies to all printer brands that support account restrictions, and copy restrictions are available on most brands. Please check the embedded manual for your device to check if it supports copy restrictions.

For example, for a restricted account, if a print job costs $0.05 and the user’s account balance is $0.01, when they try to release the job to print (either via the printer touchscreen or via the PaperCut Hive mobile app), this message is displayed:

Insufficient funds
You do not have sufficient balance to release the job(s).
Balance: $0.01
Total cost: $0.05

You can select to display or hide the balance and/or cost details in the message. For more information, see Cost Tracking Settings overview .

When and why to use Restricted and Unrestricted accounts

Organizations apply quotas in different ways, depending on whether their goals are to restrict excessive print and copy usage or whether they simply want to keep track of costs. Let’s take a look at some examples of how this works in the real world.

Restrict all users

An organization that wants to place strict limits on users might set all users to be Restricted with an overdraft limit of $0, then give all users a balance of $X. When the users’ balance reaches $0, they can’t print or copy anymore — or if they want to, they’ll have to make their case to the IT Admin!

Restrict some users, don’t restrict other users

This is a common scenario in places like schools, where students might need some encouragement to limit print and copy usage but teachers always need to be able to print and copy. In this situation, the students would be Restricted to an overdraft limit of $0, but teachers remain Unrestricted users.

Don’t restrict any users

This might be a good option for organizations that just want to keep track of print and copy behavior for accounting and reporting purposes. For example, a real estate company may schedule a $100 monthly quota for its users but leave their accounts Unrestricted. This way, even if the users’ balances reach $0, they can still print and copy — it would be awkward if a contract couldn’t be printed in time! — but the organization can still keep tabs on how much people are using printers and talk to any users that may be print or copying excessively.

Differences between restricting print/copy jobs and scan/fax jobs

Print jobs

Secure release (Find-Me): PaperCut Printer — PaperCut Printer is the printer name the end-user must select on their computer to submit a job to the secure release print queue. Users can always submit print jobs to the print queue regardless of their user balance amount. When a user’s account is restricted, the restriction will apply at the step of releasing a print job from the queue. If the user doesn’t have sufficient credit, they won’t be able to print jobs that cost more than what they have in credit, which includes the overdraft.

[COMING SOON] Direct print jobs: Print queues — Currently, quotas do not apply to jobs printed via direct print queues. The print jobs will always print and their costs will be charged to the user’s account.

Direct print jobs: passive tracking — Print quotas apply only to print jobs sent to any printer that uses the PaperCut Printer (see About print tracking ). If the printer used to print the job is added to PaperCut Hive or Pocket and it has a cost profile associated with it, the job will print and the cost will be charged against the user’s balance. If you don’t want the printer’s jobs to have any costs, for example, if it’s someone’s home printer, then just remove this printer from any cost profile.

Copy jobs

Restricting copy jobs for printer brands that support copy restrictions

A challenging characteristic of a copy job is that the printer doesn’t know how many pages the document being copied will have. Is it just 1 page? Or is it a 200-page contract?

When a user account is set to Restricted and a user performs a copy job, if the user’s account has:

• no available balance, they are unable to start a copy job
• some available balance — but the balance runs out part-way through the copy job — the printer will stop the job (see also: What is overrun? )
• more than sufficient balance, the user can both start and finish their copy job. The cost will be deducted from their balance.

How does the printer know when to stop a copy job partway through?

With PaperCut Hive, the MFD will be provided a ‘reference page cost’. This is the A4/Letter single-sided cost from the printer’s assigned Cost Profile. The MFD will use both black and white, and color costs (2 reference costs).

When the user logs into the printer to perform a copy job:

1. PaperCut Hive provides the MFD with the user’s balance and the printer’s assigned Cost Profile’s reference costs.
2. The user starts their copy job. The printer counts as pages are copied.
3. After the balance is depleted according to the reference page cost, the printer will immediately stop the job (known in PaperCut MF as zero-stop). Depending on the printer, there might be a small overrun of pages.

Due to this process, it’s possible that the user’s account might enter a negative balance after they log out. For example, if the user copied A3, which often has a higher cost than the A4 reference cost, then once the printer reports the copied pages and sizes to PaperCut Hive, a true cost calculation will be done in the cloud and applied to the user’s balance. In this scenario, with the user copying A3 pages, the cost is higher so the user’s balance is reduced by a larger amount.

What is overrun?

When a user’s account runs out of balance partway through a copy job, the printer immediately tries to stop any more pages from being printed. However, not all printers can stop a copy job immediately. Depending on the printer brand, model and speed, some extra pages might get printed. This is known as overrun.

For a more accurate estimation of overrun for your printer, please check the embedded manual for your MFDs brand, which is available from the PaperCut Hive admin console or via your PaperCut Partner.

Balance and estimation pop-up

With the PaperCut Hive embedded, you can optionally set a notification popup that provides the user with:

• their balance
• an estimation on how many pages they will be able to copy (based on their balance and the Cost Profile of the printer they are logged into).

The popup shows after users select Device Functions on the printer’s touchscreen.

The goal of the popup is to help inform the user why their copy job might suddenly stop partway through.

This popup can be toggled on and off via Reduce Waste > Cost Tracking > Settings > Show balance and costs per page when accessing Device Functions.

If you don’t want this popup displaying to users every time, you can specify a minimum balance before the user sees it. This means you can ‘warn’ your users of their low balance when it reaches a certain threshold.

The message on the MFD differs from printer brand to printer brand, and due to a number of brand limitations, no message may be displayed when the job is stopped. The popup educates the user that they might need to speak to an administrator to request more balance, which also helps the administrator understand who may be doing excessive copying.

Printing from a USB or the MFD’s hard drive

Some MFDs allow you to print documents directly from a USB stick. Others have the ability to store jobs on the MFDs hard drive and print them when needed. PaperCut Hive will treat these jobs as copy jobs, and attempt to apply the same costing and restrictions.

These restrictions vary from brand to brand. For example, one brand may stop a USB job when the user runs out of balance, others may only track and charge for the job. Please check the embedded manual for your MFDs brand, which is available from the PaperCut Hive admin console or via your PaperCut Partner.

Restricting copy jobs for printer brands that do not support restrictions

If the device does not support copy restrictions, copy jobs are unrestricted. That is, if the user’s account balance is $0 or has an overdraft, the cost of copy jobs will still be charged against the balance, which will continue to go into negative.

If you enable Restricted on a user’s account, it will only restrict the release of print jobs if the user has insufficient balance.

Tips for restricting copy jobs in other ways

Physical access — Consider restricting physical access to the photocopiers, for example, by having them in a room accessible only to the specific group of users who are allowed to do copy jobs.

Make copy jobs more expensive than print jobs — One way of making copy jobs less attractive than print jobs is by setting up much higher costs per page (using Cost Tracking) for copy jobs than for print jobs. Be sure to properly inform users at the photocopier at the time they’re doing the copy job.

Higher costs for copy jobs also helps save costs, as copy jobs use more parts in the machine: the document feeder, the moving light under the glass and the printing parts.

For instructions, see Setting up custom costs for copy jobs .

Scan jobs

Scan jobs are always Unrestricted.

Fax jobs

Fax jobs are always Unrestricted.

How overdrafts restrict print and copy usage

Overdraft limits allow Restricted users to continue to print and copy even though their account balances drop below zero. You can only set overdraft limits for Restricted users.

Here are some reasons to set an overdraft:

• You’re in an organization that’s tightly process-driven, and needs to ensure process continuity, especially where users need to complete urgent tasks, and their account balance is close to zero
• You’re in a school or university and need to provide students with a small buffer, ensuring they can complete essential print and copy tasks even if they’ve temporarily exhausted their allocated funds.
• You want to provide users with flexibility in their budget quota in an allocated period. For example, an overdraft allows user accounts to go into the negatives; they’re technically drawing on a portion of next month’s quota allocation in the current period.
• You could use an overdraft as a sort of credit system with credit limits rather than an upfront pay system, so some environments will allow users to go into the negative and then charge back that balance at a later time — a sort of credit system
• You want to be able to grant trusted users extra balance on a case-by-case basis.

For example, if the overdraft is $0, when the users try to release jobs that cost more than their balance, they will see a print denial message, either on the printer touchscreen or mobile app (the interfaces where end-users release secure print jobs).

Or you may have a scenario where you need only some very specific users to have an overdraft. In this case, you can use a bulk action to give them an overdraft, by editing the default $0 to something else.

About using bulk actions to update balances and restrictions

A bulk action lets you apply settings to multiple users simultaneously. While PaperCut Hive and Pocket don’t yet synchronize user groups from an external directory, “bulk actions” let you speed up configuration.

The simplest way to use bulk actions is to first go to the Groups page and set the All Users group to restrict all users’ accounts. Next, go to the Users page and in the Users list, manually select the users whose accounts you want unrestricted. Then use the bulk action function to make their accounts unrestricted.

This is suitable for small schools or organizations where the number of people you want to be able to print or copy is small enough to be selected manually.

For the full procedure, see Updating multiple or all user balances and restrictions .

Users and groups

Users

You can restrict an individual user from printing and copying jobs when their account balance or overdraft limit is exceeded by:

• updating a single user’s balance at any time
• updating a single user’s account restriction status
• configuring automatic setup of quotas and restrictions for new users

You can select multiple specific users to have an overdraft. In this case, you can use a bulk action to give them an overdraft, by editing the default $0 to something else.

Groups

Currently, there is one group, called [All Users]. Use this group when you want to:

• bulk change balances and user account restrictions for all users in a group
• schedule a recurring quota for a user group .

Default settings

Defaults user account settings are:

• Account balance is zero.
  By default, all users start with a $0 balance. Then, whenever they print or copy, the job cost is deducted from their user balance. So if the balance is $0, jobs with costs make this balance start going negative.
• account status is unrestricted.