Toner Allocation & Chargeback, Without the Spreadsheet
Shared stock now holds for human approval at the reorder point, and a new Fulfillments flow bills customers automatically when a replacement is their fault, not yours.
Managed print is full of small operational headaches that never show up on a feature list until you're the one living with them. Two of the sharpest: "who gets the last cartridge in the warehouse when three sites need one today?" and "how do we actually bill a customer when they're the reason a cartridge needed replacing at all?"
Shared stock, held for a human
When toner drops to reorder level, Plenix doesn't just fire off a replacement order and hope it lands where it's needed. Shared stock is now held at the reorder point for human approval before it's committed to a specific site — so if two printers hit reorder level in the same window, someone makes the call on which one gets the shared cartridge instead of a race condition making it for them.
Alongside that, we fixed a superseded dedupe bug in the request queue: a printer that already had an open replacement request could end up queued twice if levels dropped again before the first request cleared. Requests now correctly supersede rather than stack.
Two kinds of replacement, two kinds of cost
Most toner replacements are just the cost of doing business — covered by your existing stock or supplier agreement, no customer invoice involved. But when a customer loses a cartridge, or damages one through misuse, that's a different situation, and it shouldn't come out of your margin.
The Fulfillments tab on a printer's detail page now has an explicit Order Replacement (Chargeback) action: pick the color, pick a reason (lost, damaged, other), add a note, and submit. Plenix orders the replacement — pulling from shared stock if it's available and uncontested, or placing a fresh supplier order otherwise — and, if the printer's company has billing configured, raises the invoice automatically. No manual invoice line, no "remind me to bill them for that" sticky note.
Who can see what
As this flow started carrying real billing weight, we tightened who can act on it: reading fulfillment history and ordering a chargeback replacement is now restricted to managers, super admins, administrators, and accounts roles. Everyone else can still see a printer's live telemetry and toner levels — just not the fulfillment and billing detail sitting behind it.
The net effect
A managed print operation that used to run partly on institutional memory — who to call when stock is tight, which customer owes for their own mishap — now runs on a queue with an approval step and a billing trail. Less friction for the common case, a clear paper trail for the one that costs money.