… or “What are the implications of users belonging to multiple groups?”
Groups in PaperCut are used for a number of different purposes. If users belong to multiple groups, there could be a clash of logic for what rules or quotas are applied to the user, or how a user’s printing is reported.
Here is a brief description on how different features behave when a user belongs to more than one group:
Quota allocation
A user that is a member of more than one group will receive multiple allocations from each group. There is more detail about multi-group allocations in the User quota allocation section of the manual.
New user creation rules
If “initial settings” rules are defined for each user, they will receive the sum of the initial balances and the most liberal/open/functional of relevant settings (e.g. popup settings, etc). More details and examples are covered in the New User Creation Rules section of the user manual (see the Handling multiple group membership section at the bottom of the manual page).
Group summary reports
The user’s printing totals will be credited in full to each group they belong to. If a user belongs to more than one group, the amount will be allocated to each in full rather than split equally. Hence group reports that run over users that belong to more than one group may not be appropriate for selected accounting procedures (since certain metrics will be duplicated for multiple groups).
If an organization needs to allocate printing to departments, facilities, or cost centers where users perform printing under more than one area, the organization should consider using the client popup and Shared Accounts . This allows users to allocate printing to areas at the time of print. Alternatively, using office or department reporting as detailed in Maintaining office/department history can retain the historical record of when a user moved office or department.
For more Reporting questions, check out our Reporting FAQs and Report Data FAQs .
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