Advanced Reporting Best Practices (and What to Look for) to Save Your Enterprise Time and Money

When we talk about PrinterLogic and all the advantages of its serverless printing infrastructure, we like to emphasize one thing above all else: It eliminates print servers. That’s super important to us. And it’s even more important to our customers. PrinterLogic’s serverless printing is what has helped them overcome the limitations, hassle and expense of old-school printing solutions.

Of course, PrinterLogic does way more than just eliminate print servers. It also provides advanced reporting capabilities that help organizations follow best practices when it comes to auditing and oversight of their print environments.

It’s worth taking a deeper dive into this functionality to see what exactly it is, which of its features make the biggest impact and how it can further streamline things in the long run.

PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting functionality shines a light on every corner of your print environment. It captures all kinds of print-related data and, just as importantly, enables you to make sense of it. That helps you truly understand your print environment at every level. Which ultimately drives better decision-making.

Among other things, advanced reporting provides detailed reports on all print activity throughout the organization. Any printer that’s associated with PrinterLogic—whether networked or USB—is included. Admins can then view that activity down to the user and device level across the entire organization. They can also automatically share the reports by having them emailed to department heads and executives per a custom schedule.

Auditing is another part of PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting. That allows admins to quickly pinpoint what changed in the print environment, who changed it and when it happened. All actions are stored and viewable for quick access.

While auditing is great for security, it’s also great just from a service standpoint. If an admin notices that a particular printer setting is being changed repeatedly, they can reach out to that user and provide printer support.

The ability to eliminate print servers is probably the most far-reaching benefit companies will get from PrinterLogic. But if we put serverless printing to one side and look just at PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting, there are tons of features that lead to cost savings, reduced IT overhead, improved printer support and fleet optimization.

Unsurprisingly, the features with the biggest impact are also the ones that conform to recommended best practices. These include:

• Metadata recording: Every print job is bundled with additional info, or metadata, on the initiating user, the workstation, document title, timestamp and more. This metadata is stored for easy access in the internally managed database.

• Intelligent integration: Along with storing print job metadata independently, you can also integrate this data with your existing business intelligence (BI) tools. That way, you can leverage the power of both solutions.

• Comprehensive tracking: PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting doesn’t just capture network/USB print and copy activity. It also ties consumables usage to actual costs, giving you a better fix on the dollar value of your usage.

• Device monitoring: Admins can set up advanced reporting to monitor the SNMP status of printers and receive alerts. This is a major contributor to better printer support because it allows IT to be more proactive.

• Information sharing: As already mentioned, admins can schedule periodic reports to be sent to decision-makers. That encourages accountability and educates the organization on often overlooked print usage and costs.

• Data clarity: Through intuitive graphs and charts, it’s easy to determine things like departmental usage, printer usage and paper waste. You can then troubleshoot areas of concern.

By putting those features to good use, companies can adopt best practices for auditing and reporting as well as individual and departmental accountability. And those practices are considered the best for a reason. It’s because they contribute to the long-term success and health of a company.

PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting answers valuable and otherwise hard-to-quantify questions about the cost of printing on a single printer. Or the cost of toner and paper for the entire organization. Or the scale of color printing to black and white. The list goes on.

It can also inform new printer policies and fine-tuning of driver profiles for more efficiency. Or offer consolidation guidance to optimize the printer fleet. Or advance warning of printing devices that are starting to fail. That list goes on too.

These outcomes aren’t pie in the sky. EPIC Management is a California-based healthcare management and consulting services company that made PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting a key part of its organization-wide rollout. Through SNMP monitoring and automatic distribution of regular reports, EPIC Management has been able to offer superior printer support and migrate to a cost-plus printing model. Read the case study here.

And by working alongside PrinterLogic’s serverless printing, advanced reporting can maximize the gains from eliminating print servers to save even more time and money. So sign up today for your PrinterLogic demo and try our serverless printing infrastructure, advanced reporting and other amazing features completely free of charge for 30 days.