Turning Pickup On

Pickup is off until you turn it on. It is a deployment-wide switch: on or off for everywhere.

Switch it on#

1. Go to Settings → Modules.
2. Find Pickup handling.
3. Turn it on.

Turning it on immediately adds the Pickup page and the pickup settings, and starts tracking prints as they finish. Turning it back off hides those surfaces and stops new tracking. It never deletes anything, so prints already on your shelves keep their records.

Nobody can see the Pickup page until they hold the right permission. See Roles & Permissions; the pickup permissions are grouped together under Pickup.

Answer the two questions about your building#

Settings → Pickup handling. There are two, and neither of them is about the software.

When a print counts as being in its bin#

Option	What happens	Who it suits
Staff record it	A print is not put away until somebody scans it into a bin or presses Put away.	Anywhere a person or a scanner marks drop-offs.
Assume it was put away	A print counts as being in its bin the moment one is chosen.	Places where prints are simply carried to the rack and nobody records anything.

When a bin check cannot find a print#

Option	What happens	Who it suits
Flag it as missing	The print is marked missing for somebody to look into. Reversible.	Anywhere collections are recorded as they happen: a counter, or a scanner at the shelves.
Assume it was collected	The print is recorded as collected, by inference, with nobody’s name against it. Cannot be undone.	Self-service shelves where the check is the only thing that ever finds out.

Flag it as missing is the default, because it is the answer that is never irreversibly wrong.

What a scan means is deliberately not a setting here. It is decided by the screen the scan arrived at, so one deployment can have a counter, a scanner at the bins and a weekly walk all at once. See Pickup stations and Bin checks.

Choose how prints get a bin#

Settings → Pickup handling → How prints are assigned. This is the decision worth thinking about, because it should match how your shelves are already laid out.

Option	What happens	Who it suits
One bin per person	Everything one person is waiting on shares a bin. A new bin is only taken when they have none.	Most places. People look for their stuff, not their print’s.
Next free bin	Each print goes in the emptiest bin with room.	Small spaces where prints turn over quickly.
By surname	Each print goes in the emptiest bin covering the person’s surname initial.	Anywhere already sorting shelves alphabetically.
Staff choose	Nothing is assigned. Staff pick a bin on the pickup screen, then scan each print into it.	Places with an existing physical system.
No bins	Prints are tracked and scanned out, with no location recorded.	Scanning without shelves.

Changing this applies from the next print onwards. Prints already in a bin are never moved.

Prints spread out; they do not stack#

Whichever option you pick, a print goes to the emptiest bin it is allowed in, not the first one with room. Ten prints across three empty shelves end up roughly four, three and three rather than ten, none and none.

This is deliberate. Filling one shelf to the brim before starting the next makes finding a single print a search through forty boxes instead of a glance at eight, and it means the day that shelf fills, everything lands on the next one. Where two bins are equally empty, the one with the lower Order wins, so a quiet week still fills your shelves front to back.

When the shelves are full#

Every option can run out of space. When that happens the print is still tracked, it appears at the top of the Pickup page saying it has nowhere to go, and the label prints without a bin. Nothing is silently crammed into a full shelf, and no print is ever lost because there was no room.

The other settings#

All under Settings → Pickup handling, and there are only two.

Track failed prints too. On by default. A failed print is still a physical object somebody has to remove. Turn it off only if failed parts go in the bin at the machine.

Collect within. How long someone has before their print counts as overdue. Two weeks by default. Nothing is thrown away automatically: overdue is the deadline your rules measure against, and the point at which the Pickup page starts flagging a print.

A print is tracked from the moment its outcome is confirmed. That used to be a setting with a “wait until the printer is cleared” alternative, and it was a false choice: confirming an outcome is the moment a print stops belonging to the machine and starts being an object somebody has to deal with. Waiting only delayed the label and the owner’s notification, and left a window in which a finished print existed with nothing tracking it.

Rules do what they say. There is no separate “let pickup rules take action” switch. If you want to watch a rule before it affects anybody, turn on Test mode on that rule. It is on the rule’s own page, which is where you are when you have the question. And each rule says how often it runs, rather than sharing one deployment-wide schedule; see Chasing uncollected prints.

Set up your bins#

When a label-printer integration is configured, use Print label beside a bin or Print all labels above the list. The bulk action prints the bins currently shown, so a site filter also limits which shelf signs are printed.

Settings → Pickup. This page is your shelves and nothing else: every policy above is a setting, and the Pickup settings button in its corner opens that section of Settings directly.

Add one entry for each shelf, bin, or locker.

• Code is what goes on the shelf and on every label filed there. Keep it short and readable from across a room: B-04, SHELF-2. Each code names one shelf across your whole deployment.
• Label is the human description: “Second shelf, by the door”.
• Sites are the sites whose prints can be filed here. Every bin needs at least one; tick more than one for shelving several rooms use; see below.
• Capacity is optional. Leave it empty for no limit.
• Letters appears only when you are sorting by surname. See Sorting by surname.
• Order breaks the tie when two bins are equally empty. Number your shelves the way somebody walks past them.
• Assign prints here decides whether prints are sent to this shelf. See Overflow shelves.

If you run more than one site, the list starts showing every bin you have, with a filter to narrow it to one site’s.

Overflow shelves#

Assign prints here is the switch behind two jobs that turn out to be the same job.

Turn it off and the shelf stops being sent prints. It keeps everything already on it, it still appears on every pickup screen, staff can still file prints onto it by hand, and bin checks still walk it. Nothing is ever assigned there automatically.

That is what you want for:

• An overflow rack. The shelf you move prints onto on the day everything else is full. Nothing lands there on its own, and everything that does land there is tracked exactly like any other print.
• A shelf you are retiring. Switch it off and let it empty out over a few weeks instead of carrying fourteen boxes somewhere else this afternoon.

Switching a bin off is not deleting it. Pluraprint refuses to delete a bin that still holds prints — the boxes are on the rack, and a database that disagreed with the room is the one problem this whole feature exists to prevent.

Sorting by surname#

Under By surname, each bin covers a span of the alphabet, and a print files under the initial of its owner’s surname — the last word of their display name. Ada Lovelace and Lovelace, Ada both file under L.

Give a bin its span in the Letters field, and write it however you like: A-L, a-l, A - L and A to L are all the same shelf, and a single letter like A is a shelf that takes only that letter. Pluraprint tidies it to one spelling for you.

If your shelves are already labelled, you can skip the Letters field. A bin whose code reads as a span — A-L, M-Z — covers that span on its own.

More than one shelf for the same letters is normal, because half the alphabet is always busier than the other half. Codes have to be unique, so number them: A-L 1 and A-L 2 both cover A to L, and prints spread across the two of them by the same emptiest-first rule as everything else.

A bin that does not read as a span of letters — OVERFLOW, LOCKER-12, B-04 — simply takes no part in surname sorting. It is not an error, and nothing is filed there by surname. (B-04 is deliberately read as shelf four rather than as the B shelf. If you want two B shelves, call them B 1 and B 2.)

If nobody’s surname matches any shelf, the print appears at the top of the Pickup page saying it has nowhere to go, rather than being filed somewhere nobody will look.

Shelving that several sites use#

A site in Pluraprint groups printers and agents: usually one network, or one room. Shelving does not always line up with that. A makerspace with an FDM room and a resin room on separate networks is two sites, and both rooms’ finished prints might go on one rack in the corridor between them: a rack that is in neither room.

So a bin is not owned by a site. It is assigned to as many as you like. Tick both rooms under Sites and, from then on:

• Prints from either site can be filed on that rack.
• Both sites’ pickup screens list what is on it, and a bin check started at either one covers it.
• Its capacity counts everything on it, from either site, because a shelf fills up from both ends.
• The bin appears in both sites’ bin lists.

A bin ticked for one site behaves exactly as an ordinary shelf: only that site files into it.

Two rules keep it honest.

Bin codes are unique across the deployment, because a bin can be reached from anywhere you tick and a label saying “B-04” has to mean one shelf. Pluraprint refuses a duplicate and tells you which sites the existing one serves.

And you cannot un-tick a site while its prints are still on the shelf. Removing it would take the rack off that site’s pickup screen while boxes are visibly sitting on it. Empty it first, or turn off Assign prints here so the shelf is sent nothing more while it empties.

The bin on labels and in emails#

If you already notify people when a print finishes, you do not have to change anything. Turn pickup on and the message sent for Completed starts carrying the bin: the label prints it in large type, and the email shows it as “Collect from B-04” with the collection deadline underneath. The bin is chosen before that message goes out, which is why one message can say both that the print is done and where it is.

That covers most deployments, because Completed is what the email integration notifies on out of the box.

Add Ready for Collection as a trigger only if you want a separate message at that moment, somewhere that puts prints away long after they come off the machine, for instance. On a deployment that notifies on both, people get two messages about the same print, which is usually not what you want.

Labels carry the bin in large type, plus a barcode holding the print’s pickup code. Labels printed before you turned pickup on still scan: Pluraprint understands both.

A print handed directly to its owner from the station is marked collected and produces no label. It never occupied a bin, so there is nothing to attach a label to.

The bin is the only thing printed in large type, and it shrinks to fit however long your bin codes are. A print with no bin: under no bins, under staff choose, or when the shelves are full: simply gets no large type, and its barcode still holds the pickup code. With pickup off, the barcode holds the print job number instead.

If you scan labels, use 62 mm tape or the 29 × 90 mm address label. A pickup code needs room. On 29 mm or 38 mm continuous tape the barcode is squeezed narrower than a handheld reader can be relied on to read, and Pluraprint says so in the agent’s log when it happens. The code is always printed underneath in plain text, so a squeezed label can still be typed in, but if scanning is the point, pick a stock with room for it.

Label stocks#

Choose the stock under Label Configuration on the integration, matching whatever roll is in the printer:

Stock	Sold as	Notes
29 mm continuous tape	DK-22210	Narrow. The barcode is too tight to scan reliably.
38 mm continuous tape	DK-22225	Still tight for a pickup code.
62 mm continuous tape	DK-22205	The wide roll. Scans well, and the label is cut to fit its content.
29 × 90 mm address label	DK-1201, DK-11201	Pre-cut labels, printed sideways along the length.

The 29 × 90 mm address label is the one to reach for if you are already buying pre-cut labels, or if 62 mm tape is wider than you want on a small box. Pluraprint prints it turned a quarter turn, so the content runs along the label’s 90 mm length, which gives the barcode roughly three times the room 29 mm tape does, and more than the 62 mm roll. You read it the way you would read any address label on a parcel.

Pre-cut labels cannot stretch, so a long print name is shortened and the bin’s human description is left off when there is not room for it. The print name, the bin code and the barcode are never given up.

Bins themselves do not need labels to scan. Write the code on the shelf where people can read it; staff pick the bin they are standing at on the pickup screen.

Prints that get a bin later, because the shelves were full, or because staff choose bins by hand, are not covered by the completion message, since there was nothing to say when it was sent. Those are what Ready for Collection and Put Away for Collection are for.