Cutting colour for the whole office because of one department punishes the wrong people. PaperCut rules follow groups, so you can take colour away from exactly the group that abuses it - and the honest way to do it is conversion, not a hard block, so their work never stops, it just stops costing colour money.
There are two ways to stop a group's colour printing: deny colour jobs, or convert them to greyscale automatically. Denial creates helpdesk tickets and urgent exceptions; conversion quietly removes the cost while the document still prints. This guide uses conversion for the department, keeps their black and white printing fully open, and leaves the rest of the office's colour access exactly as it was.
Before touching any rule, run the user printing summary grouped or filtered for the department and check the colour percentage of their pages. Sometimes the story "Sales prints everything in colour" is true; sometimes it is one person, or one month of genuine colour work like a product launch. The report tells you which. If it is one person, a conversation plus the job log is the fix - not a group rule. If the whole group's colour share is far above the office average month after month, a rule is justified and you have the numbers to show when you announce it.
The rule follows the group, so the group must be accurate. PaperCut groups come from your directory sync - Active Directory or whichever source you configured. Check the department's membership inside PaperCut's Groups tab: everyone in the department present, nobody from other teams included by mistake, and new joiners landing in the group automatically. A colour rule applied to a stale group produces the worst kind of complaint - the wrong person converted, the real culprit untouched.
Open the colour printer in the admin console, go to Print Scripting, and enable the convert-colour-to-greyscale recipe with a condition: apply it when the user belongs to the department's group. Their jobs still print immediately, rendered in black and white, charged at the mono rate. On the same printer, jobs from every other group pass through in colour normally. If the department also has a mono printer, consider whether the rule is even needed there - it is not; greyscale conversion matters only where colour exists. Test with one account from the group and one from outside it before announcing anything.
A total colour ban for a working department always fails eventually - a client-facing document will genuinely need colour. Decide the escape route in advance: for example, the department head's account stays exempt from the rule, or one named person can release colour jobs on request. Publish that route when you announce the change. What you are removing is casual, default colour - drafts, internal copies, emails. Deliberate colour, approved by a named human, remains possible, and that distinction is exactly what makes the rule fair and defensible.
Run the same report after a full month. The department's colour pages should be near zero, their total pages roughly unchanged (proof their work was never blocked), and the colour toner bill visibly lower. Share that summary with the department head. If the conversion caught genuine work repeatedly - the same client document every week - move that workflow to the exception route formally instead of letting resentment build. Rules that are reviewed once and adjusted in the open stop being resented surprisingly fast.
The video shows group-based rules being applied live - watch how the condition is set before you build yours.
▶️ Watch Full VideoAlmost never. A denied job stops work, generates an angry call, and gets manually overridden - after a month of that, someone disables the rule entirely. Conversion keeps the document flowing at mono cost. Denial makes sense only where colour itself is the security or compliance problem, not the cost problem.
Apply the same script condition on each colour queue, or hold the department to one shared colour printer and put the rule there. The second option is cleaner: fewer queues to maintain, and the printer usage report then shows the department's whole colour story on one device.
Yes - the printed page is visibly black and white, and their job log shows the mono charge. PaperCut can also show a notification to the user when a script changes their job, and enabling it is the honest choice: people accept a rule they are told about at the moment it applies.