Pickup Overview

Pickup is what happens to a print after it finishes: where it is put, who takes it, and what becomes of the ones nobody comes for.

Without it, a finished print falls off the end of Pluraprint. The job says “completed” and the part sits on a shelf until somebody recognises it. Pickup keeps tracking it, so you can answer “where is my print?” at a glance, and “how many prints has nobody collected this term?” at the end of the year.

Pickup is optional. It is switched off until an administrator turns it on, and it can be turned on for some of your sites and not others. See Turning pickup on.

How prints reach people#

There is no single “pickup mode” to choose. Prints leave your shelves in whatever ways they actually leave them, and Pluraprint records each one for what it is:

• Handed over at a counter. Staff scan the label, confirm, and give the print to its owner.
• Taken off an open shelf. Nobody is standing there. A periodic bin check finds out what has gone.
• Scanned out at the shelves. A scanner sits by the bins. A print is scanned when it goes on the shelf and scanned again when somebody takes it off.
• Given straight to its owner. The person is standing at the machine when the print finishes and walks away with it. It never reaches the shelves at all.

All four can happen in the same building on the same day, and any of them can be combined with regular bin checks to catch what got missed. What decides what a particular scan means is the screen it was scanned at, not a deployment-wide setting: see Pickup stations.

The two questions you do have to answer#

Both live in Settings → Pickup handling, and both are about your building rather than about the software.

When does a print count as being in its bin?#

• Staff record it (the usual answer). A print is only “ready to collect” once somebody scans it into a bin or presses Put away on the completion screen. Until then it is listed as still to be put away, which is the honest state for a part still on a build plate.
• Assume it was put away. A print counts as being in its bin as soon as one is chosen. Pick this where nobody records drop-offs at all; otherwise your “still to be put away” list fills up with prints that have been on the shelf for weeks.

What happened when a bin check cannot find a print?#

• Flag it as missing (the default). Somebody should look into it. Nothing irreversible happens, and the next check that finds the print puts it back. Right for anywhere that records collections as they happen: a counter, or a scanner at the shelves, because a print that has vanished from such a place is a discrepancy, not a collection.
• Assume it was collected. Right for a self-service shelf where nobody records anything. The bin check is then the only way you ever find out a print has been taken, so it should say so. This is the weaker evidence and Pluraprint is honest about it: the print is recorded as collected by inference, with no member of staff’s name against it, and finishing a check asks you to confirm first because it cannot be undone.

You can change your mind at any time. A bin check already in progress keeps the answer that was in force when it started, so nobody’s half-finished walk changes meaning under them.

What else you get#

• Tracking. Every finished print becomes something waiting to be collected, with an owner, an age, and a collection deadline. Works with nothing but a mouse.
• Bins. Shelves, bins, or lockers, and a choice of how prints are assigned to them. The bin is printed on the label and shown on the collection board.
• Bin checks. Always available, whatever else you do. See Bin checks.
• Rules. “Email the owner at two weeks. Restrict their account at four.” Written as rules you can watch before they take effect, each one saying how often it checks.

The life of a finished print#

State	What it means
Not put away	Finished and tracked, but nobody has confirmed where it physically is.
Ready to collect	Confirmed in its bin. This is what shows on a collection board.
Collected	It reached the person it belongs to.
Missing	Staff looked for it and could not find it. Set by hand, when somebody needs to record that a print is not where it should be.
Abandoned	Nobody came for it in time. It can still be collected. This is a label, not a lock.
Disposed of	It has been thrown away or recycled.
Cancelled	There was never a physical print worth tracking. Kept apart from disposed of so it does not count as uncollected waste.

Missing and abandoned are deliberately not the same as collected. “Somebody took it and we know” is a different fact from “it is not where we left it”, and keeping them apart is what makes the reports worth reading.

How a print was collected is always recorded, and the four ways are not interchangeable: handed over with a scan, ticked off a list by a member of staff, given straight to its owner at the machine without ever reaching a shelf, or found gone at a bin check with nobody’s name against it. The print’s own history always says which it was.

Where to look#

• Pickup in the sidebar: everything still waiting, grouped by bin, with both the counter and the bin check beside it. Which of those you see depends on your own permissions, not on a setting.
• Settings → Pickup handling: the two questions above, and how prints are assigned to bins.
• Settings → Pickup: your bins, with a button through to the settings above.
• Settings → Automation: rules about prints nobody collects.
• A pickup counter station by the shelves, and a collection board on the wall. See Pickup stations.

What pickup does to your data#

A print that has not been collected is never deleted, even if your data retention policy would otherwise remove it. The retention clock effectively starts when the print is collected because deleting the record would leave a physical object on a shelf with nothing saying whose it is.