Convenient budgeting support

As printing and copying play a vital role in learning and education, it is essential to implement a fair use policy and charge for these services. Print jobs must be secured and charged back to the appropriate student, faculty, or research project. Budgets are the perfect way to limit print and copy activities. They can be enabled or disabled for individual users, groups, and locations only.

Charging students for copying and printing

After login to the device, users see their remaining budget at the top of their print queue. uniFLOW Online calculates which jobs can be printed with the remaining budget and will reject any job(s) that exceed the budget. All costs incurred are deducted from a user's budget.

Jobs might be canceled due to technical issues such as paper jams. Canceled print or copy jobs will automatically be refunded and shown in a relevant transaction entry. Each copy session lasts for a specific period; possible refunds are calculated after the session ends, which can take up to 30 minutes. With budgets enforced, print jobs cannot be released in emergency mode i.e. the device cannot reach uniFLOW Online and users cannot print directly from cloud sources. Instead, they need to 'Save to queue' before printing.

Double wallet system

Budget functionality has been designed to work with the double wallet concept, differentiating between primary and secondary wallets to distinguish between top-ups made by an organization/ school and top-ups made by students or employees. The funds from both wallets are combined to make the total available budget, which a user will use to print or copy. The primary wallet is charged first for print and copy costs. The secondary wallet is accessed once the primary wallet is depleted or has insufficient funds.

Manage student budgets automatically

Administrators can easily manage the double wallet system by automatically (re)setting a budget on schedule or topping up a budget. When onboarding new students to the system at the beginning of the study year, students can automatically receive a starting budget to print and copy immediately if required. As a result, no more manual handling of budgets per individual student is needed, saving valuable effort and time for the administrator.

Self-service top-up by students

Students and staff can easily add funds to their secondary wallets using a straightforward payment process. Via the uniFLOW Online web interface, balances can be recharged via PayPal™, Flywire (WPM), or Quickpay, or a cashier can add funds manually to a user's account where a personal cash-based system is required.