Equitrac Office 4

At the beginning, the main recipients of PDA systems were law firms, using such solutions for Client billable expenses. Cost recovery systems were not used for economy, but they were in fact a tool for increasing profits. They enabled reliable cost recovery and allocating them to specific Clients and case numbers.

Employees of law firms performing copying or printing operations give the case number that the given document concerns. Usually, Equitrac systems are integrated with financial and accounting systems, from which case numbers are collected, data concerning generated costs are sent, which then change into invoices for Clients.

The company Equitrac is an unquestionable leader on the market of solutions for law firms. In the times of the DOS system, such a solution was Equitrac System 3, then together with the appearance of the graphic platform Windows - Equitrac System4. Currently, System4 has been replaced by solutions from the group Equitrac Professional, additionally embracing the control of telephone calls.

Systems for the legal market have specific functions useful for lawyers, e.g. possibility of employing three codes: law firm employee, Client no., case no. Equitrac Professional terminals look like small laptops with large colour display units, comfortable keyboard and many options of searching for codes e.g. by key words.

In the aim of expanding their offer by products directed at a wider market, in 2000, the company Equitrac bought out their hitherto partner, the Canadian company Software Metrics Inc., taking the product PAS under its trademark. Developed further by the company Equitrac Printer Accounting Server, at the beginning it changed its name to PrintLog Accounting Server to finally adopt the name Equitrac Office. The current version of the product is the Equitrac Office 4 system.

Basing on the modular build and broad functionality, Equitrac Office system is directed at a wide group of recipients. Depending on the configured options the system Equitrac can facilitate such a variety of Clients as:

• settling costs for projects – design offices
• levying payments from students using copiers and printers – universities,
• monitoring work costs in the background – so-called ordinary offices.

The most convenient option of monitoring network printers is the installation of components of Equitrac system on print servers. No interference on users’ stations is required, which greatly simplifies the administration of the solution.

Users printing are identified in the Equitrac system by the network login. Users’ accounts and membership to departments of the company can be updated in a number of ways, the most popular being synchronisation with catalogue services Active Directory.

Depending on the chosen configuration variant, monitoring of prints can be entirely invisible to employees, but can also be based on limiting the possibility of printing once the financial resources assigned in the system are used up. The budget can be assigned at the level of employees or departments. As an example, on the basis of the virtual budget mechanism, settling printing costs may take place in academic centres. Equitrac system has assigned a special version of the system for this called Equitrac Express.

Local printers (LPT1, USB, infrared, Blue thus, etc.) may be monitored after installing a desktop printing agent at a working station. In the same way, network printers not controlled at the level of the print server can also be monitored.

Software installed on users’ stations introduces a series of additional options, such as the possibility of checking printing costs before accepting work, external authorisation of users not logged into the domain, possibility of using billing codes – therefore, accounting works for analogical projects like in law firm systems.

Monitoring copiers is realised through connecting the external terminal PageCounter to the copier. The terminal authorises the user and unblocking the copier’s desktop using the keyboard or card reader. Depending on the manufacturer and model of the copier, only pages are counted in the course of printing or also additional attributes of the print such as paper format or colour.

Page Counter terminals are connected to the Ethernet network and communicate with the central Equitrac server, from which employees' codes are downloaded and send counted transactions.
Terminals allow for the introduction of one or two codes (the first can be read from the card), e.g. employee’s identification and password, or employee’s code and project code.
Terminals can buffer codes in their memory enabling "offline" work in the case of a network failure or the central Equitrac server being switched off.

Modern multifunctional devices Canon and Xerox have a built-in mechanism for monitoring work costs on the basis of employee codes. Thanks to the cooperation of both manufacturers with the company Equitrac, an interface has been developed allowing to integrate the offered accounting functions from the manufacturers with the Equitrac system.

Employee codes are defined centrally in the same way as for Equitrac terminals, as well as for Canon and Xerox multifunctional devices. The codes are entered at the level of a touch screen of the device’s desktop.

The Equitrac system gathers data accounted by devices concerning printing, copying, scanning and faxing, where printing and copying are accounted with all additional attributes.