How to charge users for their print jobs?
Step 1. Enable ''Balance'' for organizational users
Admins can specify an organization-wide balance. In this case, it will be automatically applied to all new members who register on the platform.
Go to ''Payments''
Set up a default User balance
Save changes
An Admin can change the balance for each user:
Find the user
Click on their balance to modify it
Press Enter
How is the job price calculated?
When members of the organization submit a print job, the cost of the job is automatically deducted from their balance.
3DPrinterOS has a built-in mechanism for cost calculation.
Three parameters affect the cost:
Print weight
Print duration
Deprecation costs
Print cost = [print weight]*[price per kilogram] + [print duration]*[price per hour] + [dep. cost]
Print weight and duration are estimated by 3DPrinterOS based on the .gcode file analysis.
Step 2. Set-up cost settings
The Organization admin can set up prices per printing hour, kilogram of material, and deprecation cost. Those prices can be set up in two ways:
A) For specific slicing profiles.
Go to the Slicing Profiles page
Find the necessary profile. Click Edit:
Go to the Price tab in the Slicer application window
Please make sure to specify the parameters and select the material.
The density of the material is necessary for determining the exact weight of the model and calculating the material costSlicer 3(discontinued) and Slicer 5, the material density is derived from the material selected in the profile
Click Save/Overwrite
B) Organization-wide
It applies to all slicing profiles except those with price settings.
Go to Organization Admin
Go to Payments
Enable "Regular user default pricing for every Slicing Profile"
Remember to save your settings. 😉
A Workgroup moderator can also set up prices for their slicing profiles.
Step 3. Changing the cost for the print job manually
An Organization Admin can change the cost of the job manually when it is submitted in the Job details window.
Find the necessary print job on the Printers or the History page
Click on the Job row to open Job Details (or the three-dot menu –> Details)
3. Navigate to the Transactions
The transaction tab is only available if the admin can access the printer where the job was submitted.
4. Enter the new cost and add a description for the transaction
5. Click Update
The cost difference between the old and the new cost will be deducted or added to the final invoice.
More. Other cases that lead to a transaction
When the job is moved – no transaction happens.
When the job is restarted – the job owner is charged again
When the job is copied – the new job owner is charged. So, if the job is copied on the admin's behalf, he will be charged for it.
It's possible to disable charging when a job is copied or restarted. Read about it below:
If the job is canceled, the submitter will be refunded
If the job fails or is canceled during the print, the submitter will be refunded according to the job completion percentage.
Refund amount = [Job cost] x [100% - % of job completion]
For example, if a $100 job progresses to 99% and then is canceled, the user receives a $1 refund.
It's also possible to disable automatic refunds. Read below.
Step 4. Customizing Billing for Organizations
We've already mentioned the ''default user balance" and "default pricing'' settings above.
Let's see what else can be customized:
Default Currency.
USD, EUR, GBP, ILS, CNY and CAD are available currently. Contact support@3dprinteros.com to add another currency.Disable automatic refund if the print job is not finished.
In some cases, the Organization Admins don't want to refund when the job fails because the submitter prepared it incorrectly, and it's the submitter's fault. The admins may use this setting to define the refund amount themselves.Disable automatic Charge when the print job gets copied/restarted
In some cases Organization admins want regular users to only pay once for a job, and if it is copied or restarted, the user won't get charged.
Why a user was not charged for a print
If a job shows no cost or the user's balance did not change, check the causes below.
The file was sliced before pricing was set
The price is attached to a job when the file is sliced. Files sliced before you set up or changed pricing have no price attached, even after the new pricing is saved. Deleting or editing the slicing profile does not add a price to files that were already sliced.
To handle these jobs, reject any job that arrives without a price and ask the user, in the reject message, to slice the file again. The re-sliced file is charged like any new job.
A slicing profile has its price set to 0
Prices set on a slicing profile override the organization-wide setting "Regular user default pricing for every Slicing Profile". A profile with its price set to 0 makes every job sliced with it cost 0. Check the Price tab of every slicing profile your users can select, including profiles that another admin or moderator added to your workgroups.
The file was sliced outside 3DPrinterOS
Uploaded G-code that was sliced in another program shows the Sliced externally icon in the file list. These jobs are charged with the organization-wide price per gram, not with a slicing profile price. A job without that icon was sliced in the 3DPrinterOS Cloud.
The job was copied or restarted
If "Disable automatic Charge when the print job gets copied/restarted" is enabled in Payments, copied and restarted jobs are not charged.
Past prints are not recalculated. Fixing the pricing affects files sliced from then on. Jobs that already printed without a charge are not repriced automatically.