Most office waste is not villains printing novels - it is defaults. Every document leaves the PC set to colour, one side only, because that is how the driver was installed. PaperCut print scripts quietly fix the defaults on the server: colour becomes greyscale, single-sided becomes duplex, and nobody has to remember anything.
PaperCut includes a scripting engine that inspects every job before it prints and can modify the job itself - not just warn about it. Two built-in recipes do most of the saving in a real office: force duplex and convert colour to greyscale. This guide applies both, printer by printer, with the exception handling that stops the one legitimate colour job - the client presentation, the design proof - from turning into a daily fight.
Open a printer in the PaperCut admin console and find the Filters and Restrictions and Print Scripting areas. A print script is a small server-side recipe that runs when a job arrives, before printing. PaperCut ships ready-made recipes for the common jobs: force a job to duplex, convert it to greyscale, redirect large jobs to a cheaper high-volume printer, or ask the user to confirm an expensive job. You enable a recipe, adjust its conditions - which users, which groups, which page counts - and save. From the user's chair nothing changes; they press Print as always. The job that reaches paper is simply the corrected version.
Enable the greyscale conversion recipe on your everyday printers. Any job sent in colour is rendered in black and white and charged at the mono rate. This single rule usually cuts the colour bill dramatically, because the truth in most offices is that colour is rarely chosen - it is inherited from a driver default or a coloured logo on page one. Leave the recipe off on the one printer genuinely reserved for colour work (marketing or design), and control who may use that printer with group permissions instead. People who truly need colour then have a clear, approved route, and everyone else stops paying colour prices for emails and invoices.
Enable the force duplex recipe on printers that have a duplexer fitted. Single-sided jobs are printed two-sided automatically. The saving is direct: paper use on long documents drops close to half. Two honest exceptions to plan for: some forms, labels and official documents genuinely must be single-sided, and a few old applications generate jobs that duplex badly. PaperCut lets the recipe carry conditions - apply it above a page threshold, for example, so short one-page letters stay single-sided while the 80-page report is forced onto both sides. Start with a page threshold if your office prints many official single-page documents.
Every forced rule needs a pressure valve, or users will route around the whole system. Script conditions can exclude a group (management, design), a printer (the colour proofing printer), or jobs below a size. Decide these exemptions in advance, write them into the rule, and tell people they exist. A rule with a known, legitimate exception is respected; a rule with no exceptions teaches the whole office to keep one un-managed printer hidden for "real work", and that printer then swallows half your savings in the dark.
After a month, compare the printer usage report with the month before the rules: single-sided pages and colour pages should both be visibly down, and PaperCut reports how many jobs the scripts modified. If the numbers barely moved, the usual cause is not the script - it is printing that bypasses the server entirely through direct connections. If complaints cluster on one document type, adjust the recipe conditions for that type rather than switching the rule off for everyone. Rules tuned this way tend to survive for years, quietly saving money nobody has to think about.
The video shows the print script recipes being enabled and a colour job coming out in greyscale - watch it before you configure yours.
▶️ Watch Full VideoIt can, which is why the recipe should carry conditions. Apply forced duplex by printer (never on the label printer), by group, or above a page count so short jobs are untouched. Test your office's standard forms once after enabling the rule - five minutes of testing prevents a month of complaints.
Only if you give them a route. The clean design is: everyday printers convert everything, and one designated colour printer - restricted to the groups that need it - does not. A user with a genuine colour job prints to that printer. There is deliberately no "please let me" button on the converted printers; a bypass on every job would return you to the default problem.
No. PaperCut charges for the job as it is finally printed, so a converted job is charged at the greyscale rate. This matters for fairness with quotas: staff should never lose colour money from their balance for a document the system itself decided to print in black and white.