Censusby Steward IT

Documentation › Using Steward IT Census

Printing

Census reads the page counters of your network printers at every SNMP scan and keeps one reading per printer per day. From those readings it shows how many pages each printer prints per month and, with the page prices you enter, what printing costs. Open it under Assets › Printing.

What is counted#

  • Total pages: the printer's lifetime page counter from the standard Printer MIB, which almost every network printer reports.
  • Black and white and color: there is no standard counter for these, so Census splits the total where it can:
    • HP printers report their black and white and color pages themselves.
    • A printer whose only toner or ink is black prints only black and white: all its pages count as black and white.
    • Other color printers show the total only. Their pages are priced as black and white and marked with *. If your printer model reports color pages under its own SNMP value, you can still read it with Custom SNMP values.

The monthly volume is the increase of the counter between readings, credited to the month of the later reading. It starts with the printer's second reading, so scan printers at least daily for accurate months. A counter that goes down (a replaced formatter board) counts nothing for that step. Readings are kept for about two years.

Printers found by a remote scanner report page counters once the scanner runs version 0.78.0 or later.

Page prices#

At the bottom of the Printing page, administrators enter what a black and white page and a color page cost, in the organization's currency (Configuration › General settings › Formats): toner or ink, drums and other parts, and a service contract if you pay per page. A model price overrides these for printers whose manufacturer and model contain the text you enter, for example LaserJet M454; the first matching row wins. Use ＋ Add a model price for more rows and ✕ to remove one.

Where to see it#

  • Assets › Printing: totals for the last 30 days and 12 months, the cost, pages per month for all printers, and a table of every printer.
  • A printer's Summary tab: its counters and, under Pages per month, the last 12 months with their cost.
  • Reports (category Printing): Printer page counts, Pages printed per printer and month, Printing cost per printer (last 12 months) with the cost per page, and Pages printed per month (all printers) as a chart. Like every report they can be put on the dashboard, emailed on a schedule or exported.