Every office has the same argument: "I barely print anything, it must be the others." PaperCut keeps a complete log of every job - user, document name, pages, colour, printer, cost - and its built-in reports turn that log into answers. This guide covers the five reports worth running and how to read them honestly.
The raw material is the Job Log: one line for every print job in the office, recorded automatically from the day PaperCut starts watching the queues. Reports are simply that log, grouped and totalled. Run them in this order the first time: user summary, printer summary, department summary, largest jobs, colour breakdown - together they explain almost everything about your office's printing.
This is the report management actually wants. For any date range it lists every user with pages printed, colour pages, and total cost, sorted so the heaviest users sit at the top. Read it with a little care: the top of the list is often a person whose job IS printing - the accounts clerk printing invoices, the admin printing forms. The report starts a conversation, not a verdict. What you are looking for is the mismatch: a user whose role should print little but whose totals rival the print-heavy roles, or one person's sudden jump compared with last month.
Grouped by printer instead of by person, this report tells you where the load sits. It answers practical questions money depends on: which printer is doing 70 percent of the office's work (and will wear out first), which expensive colour printer is being used as a general printer, and which device sits nearly idle and could be moved or retired. It is also the report that justifies rules - if the colour printer's pages are mostly internal documents, that is your evidence for the greyscale rule on that queue.
When jobs are charged to shared accounts - departments, projects, clients - the shared account report gives each cost centre its true printing total for the period. This is the report the accounts team uses for internal chargeback, and the one that makes department heads suddenly interested in their team's habits. A department that sees its own printing bill every month usually fixes its own worst habits without IT saying a word. There is a full guide in this series on setting up shared accounts and the per-page maths behind them.
Sort the job log by pages and you will find the incidents: the 400-page job printed twice because the first copy was left in the tray, the full website printed in colour, the personal document run on a Friday evening. The job log shows the document name, which settles most questions instantly. Use this report sparingly and factually. Its purpose is to find process problems - a report that should be emailed instead of printed, a form that should be a pre-printed pad - not to shame individuals in public. Shared privately with the person and their manager, it works; circulated to the whole office, it just teaches people to hide.
PaperCut can run reports on a schedule and email them as PDF, Excel or HTML. Schedule the user summary and printer summary monthly to yourself and the office manager, and the department totals to accounts. Reports that depend on someone remembering to click a button stop after two months; scheduled reports keep arriving for years. Keep the date ranges consistent month to month so the numbers are comparable, and keep the files - a year of these reports is the complete evidence base for buying a printer, renewing a contract, or setting next year's quotas.
Watch the video to see the job log and summary reports generated live from a working PaperCut server.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNo. Reports live in the admin console, and PaperCut lets you limit which administrators can see them. A normal user sees only their own balance and their own job history on their personal web page. Decide deliberately who gets report access - it is personnel information, not general IT trivia.
Usually the log, with one common exception: a job printed, jammed or was abandoned, and reprinted - the log correctly shows both attempts because both consumed processing and the first may have partially printed. Check the job status column and the time gap before concluding anything; two entries minutes apart with the same document name is normally a reprint, not double charging trickery.
As far back as your job log is kept. PaperCut retains the log in its database, and retention is effectively limited by your backup and database housekeeping rather than a short built-in cutoff. If you plan to compare year on year, include the PaperCut database in your normal server backup routine.