Time for another useful PaperCut tip. Some customers may find it beneficial to reset users or certain groups of users PaperCut balances on a schedule. As of version 17.1 of PaperCut MF this is not possible via the admin interface, but, you can manually make these changes using bulk user actions. So what do you do if you wish to automate this process?

Server-command to the rescue!

If you want to Reset PaperCut balances then luckily PaperCut provides a few options to achieve this, and one such tool is server commands. The server-command application gives access to multiple management options for PaperCut impacting print server monitoring, user maintenance and much more.
The good news here is that server-commands are perfect for making changes to PaperCut functionality using an automated script. Often a SysAdmin will manually run these commands as and when required. However, it is useful to schedule server-commands to run regularly to cut down on administrative tasks/time.

Depending on your server OS of choice you can create a batch file or create a Cron job to automate the commands.

The server command variables

This customisable script will reset users balances when run. The options are:

set-user-account-balance-by-group <group> <balance> <comment> [<account>]

Set the balance for each member of a group to the given value. This process happens in the background.

<group> – the group for which all users’ balance is to be set.

<balance> – the value to set all users’ balance to. +ve or -ve.

<comment> – a comment to be associated with the transaction.

[<account>] – Optional personal account name. Only used when multiple personal accounts are enable

Sample script

Using the above code a basic example would be:

server-command set-user-account-balance-by-group "[All Users]" 0 "Monthly Balance Reset"

This sets the balance for anyone in the [All Users] group to zero and leaves an appropriate comment for audit purposes.

The next steps

We firmly encourage all PaperCut integrators and SysAdmins to have a play with server commands. If you have a requirement or simply have some questions then get in touch with your Account Manager.