Accounting & Cost monitoring
MyQ X offers two general accounting modes you can select from:
Accounting groups (AG)
Cost centers (CC)
In both accounting modes, the primary form of monitoring are the Quotas. They can be configured to watch the number of pages (printed/scanned) and the cost of jobs printed/scanned (if pricelists are used in your environment).
Differences between Accounting groups and Cost centers
Let’s take a look what are the differences and main advantages of each mode.
Accounting groups
User can be assigned only one accounting group
All user’s spendings are then accounted towards this accounting group if there is an existing quota attached to it
When to use Accounting groups?
When a straightforward method of print, copy, and scan monitoring is wanted, e.g. per departments, classes, etc.
When projects will be the primary method to monitor or categorize usage
When credit will be the primary charging method
When no quotas are required altogether (Accounting groups are the default mode and can be kept in such cases)
Cost centers
Users can have multiple cost centers assigned
User selects to which cost center they want to account their operation after logging in on the MyQ Embedded Terminal or in the Desktop and Mobile clients
The operation is accounted only towards the cost center the user selected, other user’s cost centers are not affected
When to use Cost centers?
When more complex and layered accounting is needed
When users need to select between multiple quota-based accounts
It is recommended to select your mode at the beginning when setting up your environment, however, these modes can be switched at any point even later when you discover the need for different accounting capabilities.
How to select your accounting mode
Any organization
Target organization | Situation | Recommended accounting mode | How it can help saving and monitoring costs |
Modern office environment with different levels of printers usage | I want to have stricter control over office resource expenditures I do not need accounting towards shared accounts |
+ Personal quotas monitoring pages | When you have more transparent and strict boundaries of the resources usage in the office, it's easier to reach optimizing conclusions. According to studies, 45% of the paper printed in an office ends up in the trash [4] |
Copy rooms | I want to allocate a specific amount of monetary resource and let my staff use this amount per some certain period of time for printing how they want on one or several devices |
+ Personal quotas monitoring cost | Allowance of money for predefined MFPs in copy rooms with settings configured to spend more economically and in a unified way helps narrow down expenditures [6] |
Guest printing Client spaces, hospital, co-working | I want to let registered users perform small or middle-sized occasional print jobs |
+ Personal quotas per person and no group quotas | Redirecting occasional guest printing to actual employees of an office may result in slowing down the tempo of office work. It’s much easier to give the freedom to the guests themselves and let them use printing/scanning devices on their own in a controlled way which can lead to lessening the workload of staff that can be already managing 20.000 pieces of paper annually [7] |
Company with a lot of departments spread in different buildings | I want to set up a big variety of different accounts with different accounting ways - let people share allowance or have only personal accounts with personal quotas |
+ Personal or group quotas monitoring either pages or cost | Time spent on delays while trying to fix a stuck printer costs money. If you set up you devices with the most required and used workflows and add to that a flexible account scheme, you can gain a boost of productivity from staff [3]:
|
Accounting groups
Education
Target organization | Situation | Recommended accounting mode | How it can help saving and monitoring costs |
|---|---|---|---|
Primary education | I want a simple solution for the younger students of our school to print their works, yet be controlled of expenditures |
+ Quota group shared | Introducing shared services can help to save up to 25 % of your expenditures [1] |
Higher education | I want school staff to be able to print and copy hand-outs before class quickly and range the paper consumption depending on the class grade (using duplex, black and white, stapling during printing) |
+ Multiple quota accounts | When your organization is rather large in size, the task of controlling the expenditures gets more tricky as the individual circumstances of usage get really diverse. Here some organizations adopt Cloud-first approach and standardize the usage of other applications. This helps to reap the benefit of the flexible environment while adding an Accounting scheme even in this situation. While many private and public sector organizations choose cloud services for increasing agility, flexibility, and scalability, they also experience cost efficiencies over time. To achieve cost savings, perform strict cloud governance or risk seeing increases in infrastructure and application costs if governance is weak. [5] |
High education | I want a solution with which different staff categories as well as students can
|
| You can combine diverse accounting schemes with other services like Robotic process Automation (RPA). When your internal IT department just needs some statistical info, you can set up accounts that monitor just who used which account and add RPA to process
This allows for more time to perform thought-intensive tasks. Companies that take advantage of this cost-saving initiative will have to invest less in the future hiring staff to complete duties that RPA can easily accomplish. [2] |
Public sector
Target organization | Situation | Recommended accounting mode | How it can help saving and monitoring costs |
Guest unauthorized printing Railway station, airport, municipality office,… | I want to let unregistered users be able to print occasionally and be billed on the spot |
+ Credit with payment by vouchers | It’s important to save each possible second of your client when you run a by default busy setting such as an airport or a municipality office. Therefore printing should be an easy part of the experience, not a daunting one. You can set up print kiosks to print jobs from unregistered users and be billed right on the spot. Time is of the essence and can help heighten the overall satisfaction rate of your organization up to 60% [9] |
Ministry worker at their working spot | I would like to allocate a number of pages per person for some period of time and each person in the system must use only 1 account on all occasions to reduce the time between spooling the job and retrieving the ready job from the device |
+ Personal Quota account monitoring Pages | Precise accounting is of the essence when managing a large multi-department organization. Unifying the portfolio of 3d-party services used that provide the opportunity to track and allocate resources per person can help cost saving as well as data search and maintenance as 95% of corporate information exists on paper. [8] |
How does credit accounting fit in?
No matter which accounting mode you use, you can always enable Credit for all, selected individuals, or user groups. Credit is not tied to any accounting mode, it is its own standalone feature.
With credit, each user holds their own credit balance. Credit can be recharged manually by the delegated administrators, but also by the user themselves with the use of purchased vouchers.
Besides credit, the same users can still have active quotas monitoring pages or the cost of their print or scan jobs.
Pay-for-print accounting
Read more about credit accounting and how to set up recharging methods for either print, scan, or both.
How does project accounting fit in?
Another method of accounting is with projects. Once again, projects can be enabled alongside both accounting modes. Compared to accounts which are usually used to monitor individuals, groups, departments, or classes, projects are meant to categorize print, copy, and scan operations per their purpose.
Projects are also valuable for further document capture processing as they are included in scan metadata files and can be used for automation workflows.
Footnotes:
[2] https://www.impactmybiz.com/blog/cost-saving-initiatives-for-office-managers/
[3] https://naviant.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Shocking-Document-Imaging-Industry-Statistics.pdf
[4] https://environmentalpaper.org/project/paper-saving-efficiency/
[6] https://www.impactmybiz.com/blog/cost-saving-initiatives-for-office-managers/
[7] https://naviant.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Shocking-Document-Imaging-Industry-Statistics.pdf
[8] https://www.impactmybiz.com/blog/cost-saving-initiatives-for-office-managers/
[9] https://scanse.io/blog/office-printing-statistics/