Billing your customers for print usage has always involved a leap of faith. The customer has to accept that the number you give them each month actually corresponds to what they printed.
In the past, printing was purely billed off a hard meter—and the customer could go see how many clicks have gone through the printer since the last time you billed them. But all they could verify was that yes, there were that many “clicks” on the machine’s counter—no context to what that means.
As printers became more advanced, we began seeing more detailed counters - color and black and white, and in some cases, different counters depending on the paper size. And now, as printers become even more intelligent, software like Printerpoint can actually tell you the type of document your customer printed, so you can charge them differently for line drawings, maps, photos, etc.
Just as with meter reads, your customers have to accept that the total number you give them each month matches up - if you say they printed 100 square feet of maps and 200 square feet of line drawings, they need to pay you accordingly. And if a billing dispute comes up, it is your problem, not theirs. With the limited information available from meter collection software, you are unlikely to be able to solve this problem without adjusting your invoice downwards. Which means you lose money!
One way to provide detailed backup is to use a program like Argos (link), which tracks every single print, line by line, and shows all the details. But unless your customer is passing printing expenses onto their customers, which is common in the AEC market but not elsewhere, it can be cost-prohibitive to install that type of software.
Meet Printerpoint’s Billing Details
So how do you meet in the middle? We just added a new billing feature to Printerpoint that is just for you. Regardless of how you bill your customer - on a hard meter, using categories, or by the ink/toner and paper they use, Printerpoint now displays a detailed list of every print job that went through their printer each month.
You can see when it was printed, how much ink/toner and paper was used, which Category we assigned it to, and what type of media it was printed on. We store up to a year’s worth of printing details, and you can display any date range you desire.
If you need to provide the details to your customer as backup to resolve a billing dispute, you can easily export to an Excel-ready file so they can review the data themselves.
Available now - no upgrade needed!
Billing Details is a new feature we’ve added for all our customers automatically. No upgrade is required on your end, and this feature works retroactively, so you can see historical data from up to a year ago - just go to the Billing tab in Printerpoint and click on a printer.
Billing Details is supported for the following printer families:
HP PageWide XL
HP DesignJet (excluding T730 and T830)
HP Latex
Canon iPF
Canon iPF Pro
Océ TDS (requires Account Logic)
Océ Plotwave/Colorwave
KIP System K (requires KIP Accounting)