What was manual
Printing had a quota and a cost attached to it, which meant somebody had to keep track. That work was done by hand: auditing accounts, reconciling credits against usage, counting pages, and answering users who wanted something printed that they could not print themselves.
None of it was difficult. All of it was repetitive, and it landed on people who had other things to do.
PaperCut as the source of truth
The client already ran PaperCut, so I built around it rather than replacing it. Every printer was configured to attach to the PaperCut instance, authenticate the user, and log the job there. That gave one place where a user’s identity, their quota, and what they had actually printed all lived together.
Python queries that instance for the things staff kept looking up by hand (credits remaining and usage against quota) and pushes them into a monday.com board. Staff read the board instead of running the audit.
02
How a job moved through it
Printing from home
Users often needed something printed that they could not print themselves. That had been a conversation, an email, or a USB stick.
A monday.com form took the upload instead. The submission is tied to the user’s login, so the job is tracked and charged against their credits exactly like anything they sent from an on-site machine. The automation picks it up and prints it.
The cover sheet
Automating the digital half leaves a physical problem: overnight submissions come out as one undifferentiated stack of paper, and someone still has to work out whose is whose.
So the system generates a cover page between jobs, carrying the user’s details, and prints it with the batch. In the morning the stack is already delimited. Whoever collects it separates it on the cover sheets without reading anyone’s work or matching anything up.
It is the smallest part of the build and the one that decided whether the rest of it actually saved anyone time. A system that produces a pile of paper nobody can sort has moved the work rather than removed it.
What it came to
Almost all of the manual handling went away. The auditing runs without anyone starting it, remote requests arrive labelled and charged correctly, and the people who used to reconcile this by hand got that time back.
The scope stayed deliberately small. PaperCut already did authentication, quotas and logging well; the work was connecting what it knew to the people who needed to act on it.