[cups.general] Print Accounting

[Dan Tappin]

I looked at pykota but no where does it say that it can track printing 
on a user supplied code basis.  We bill our clients for every thing, 
phone calls, photo copying, courier, on top of our hourly rates for our 
services.  Printing is the last thing that still is no billed out - 
it's currently 100% overhead.  We need to print and specify a 4 digit 
client code and report the print stats on a per printer basis so we can 
charge the client for pages printed.

Pykota will track total pages printed on a user basis only.  For 
example I have 10 clients with multiple projects for each client.  If I 
print 100 pages across all those projects I need to know which print 
jobs were for each job.  Knowing that I printed 100 pages is useless in 
our situation.

Dan T

On Mar 24, 2005, at 1:03 PM, Ryan Suarez wrote:

> Dan Tappin wrote:
>
>> I am looking for a print accounting system and have been pointed at 
>> CUPS more than a few times.
>>
>> I run a small Windows (98, 2000 & XP) based office and we have a 
>> Xserve running OS X as a SMB fileserver.  Now the Xserve is already 
>> running CUPS and I have been looking at running all the various stand 
>> alone networked printers through the Xserve and CUPS.
>>
>> The one issue that I can't seem to resolve is print accounting.  In 
>> the ideal world every print job would require a client code i.e. no 
>> code no printing.  On my OS X Power book the print driver for default 
>> printer (a HP 4050) has a billing info field.  This does not seem to 
>> exist on the other Windows drivers in the office.
>
> pykota is a print accounting plugin for cups.  It queries the actual 
> printer for accounting info, much more accurate than cups.  This will 
> do what you need.
>