Cost management for laser printers

Academic Computing Services at Pomona College charges for laser printing to help defray the expense. Recently we installed a debit card system on our public access laser printers as a means of eliminating the need to handle cash. The purpose of this paper is to share our reasoning for selecting this method of collection, and to share our experiences so that others may benefit from what we have learned and did right, and from the mistakes we made.

Since we eliminated free printing as an option, we will discuss how we selected the debit card system for collection of payments for laser printing.

The debit card system selected, Vendacard, has been in use in the Claremont Colleges library system. We anticipated being able to piggy-back on some of the library's experience and equipment, and to be able to use the same debit card thus saving the users the problem of needing two cards, one for photo copies and one for laser printing.

With the selection of this system, and subsequent talks with the local supplier, we developed a set of expectations.

These included how much we could charge for laser printing, how the Vendacard units would be serviced, how long it would take for installation and on which machines we could install the debit card units.

Once we entered into an agreement, we learned that many of our expectations would not be met. Some of the reasons were due to problems with the Vendacard units, and some related to warranties. In all, this resulted in a revision of our agreement with the local Vendacard vendor.

The units have finally been installed and put into service. At present, they have been in use for just over one month. In this short time period we have learned a great deal about the units, how they behave and how the student users feel about them. In terms of our initial objectives, we are now cashless, and the units are administered by the local Vendacard supplier.