The Ultimate Guide to Princh

Princhy presenting the Ultimate Guide to Princh

Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Princh! On this page we will detail (almost) all there is to know about our printing and payment products, including a technical and security overview, an outline of the onboarding process with Princh, how our integrated electronic payment works, and more.

Every topic will receive its own section which will include useful links relevant to the topic at hand. You can navigate between the sections using the table of contents below, or via the left-hand sidebar on your screen.

Table of contents:

The Princh printing, copying and scanning solutions

Princh makes public printing, copying and scanning easy and accessible. Initially developed in collaboration with Scandinavian libraries, in the decade since its founding Princh has become the standard of printing and payment in the public space.

Currently, we offer three products: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) printing, PC printing, and Copying & Scanning. Some of the key features these products share are:

  • Integrated electronic payment: Electronic payment is truly integrated into all our products, meaning users must successfully complete payment to receive their print and copy jobs.
  • No user accounts: With Princh, your users do not need to set up any accounts, usernames, or passwords, nor do they have to manage money deposits, making the process easier for patrons and staff alike.
  • Self-service via an intuitive user interface: Users can easily print, copy, scan, and pay from their own devices, greatly reducing staff time spent on troubleshooting and assisting print jobs.
  • Industry leading security: Princh is the industry leader when it comes to information security; we are the first printing and payment company to receive the ISO 27001:2022 certification. We detail our information security practices in a later section on this page, which you can find here.
  • Multilingual interface: All our solutions are available in numerous languages, and we keep adding new ones on a continuous basis.

Our cloud-based solutions are designed to make document services simple, secure and convenient across many industries. You can find a more detailed overview of how we can help your organization by selecting your industry on our page here.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) printing

Our BYOD printing solution allows your patrons to effortlessly print from their own devices, such as their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. The solution is compatible with any printer, as long as it is connected to your printer server.

When printing from their phone or tablet, users are not required to download any apps. We do have apps for iOS and Android, both of which are very highly rated, but your patrons only have to use our app if they want to.

Whether your patrons use their phone, tablet or laptop, the typical printing process with Princh looks like this:

  1. The user scans the QR code near the printer, or opens their preferred web browser, goes to print.princh.com and selects the correct printer*
  2. Uploads their document(s)
  3. Adjusts the print settings
  4. Pays for their document(s) via their preferred payment method
  5. And that is it! The document(s) is now printed and ready to be collected.

*To expand on the first point; all printers set up in Princh have a unique 6-digit ID assigned to them, commonly referred to as the printer-ID. Users select the printer they want to use by entering this 6-digit ID. You can find the ID assigned to your printer(s) in the Princh Administration Panel, our central management tool.

You can experience the complete printing process using our web app from a mobile phone or a laptop via our interactive guides. Check them out!

BYOD Printing Process

The Princh Cloud Printer

The Princh Cloud Printer (PCP) is our public PC printing solution. PCP acts like a normal printer, meaning there is no difference between our solution and the printing process your patrons are used to; they just select the print option on any document, webpage, or email to begin the process.

Here is how the typical printing process looks like with our PC printing solution:

  1. The user opens the webpage, email or document they want to print
  2. Selects the ‘Print’ option
  3. The native print settings window will appear. The user does not adjust the settings here, instead they just click “Print” to proceed
  4. The Princh Cloud Printer interface will now appear. The user can now adjust the print settings and add more documents if they wish to
  5. Using our integrated payment solution, the user can now pay for their document(s)
  6. The document(s) is now printed and ready to be collected.

Uniquely, even when printing from a public PC, users can pay for their print job from their own devices, thus they do not have to enter any payment information on the public PC. They can do this by scanning a QR code on the payment screen.

PCP is available as a native application for Windows and Linux but can also be used on Macs and Chromebooks.

You can check out the full printing process via our PC printing interactive guide.

Princh PC Printing Process

Copying & Scanning

Our product removes the complexity from copying and scanning; users are guided through a simple wizard-based flow, which displays large and clear buttons. It also includes a forced preview of the user’s document(s) to prevent errors and unwanted documents.

Similarly to our PC printing solution, when paying for their copy jobs users have the option to scan a QR code and complete payment from their own devices, rather than entering their payment information on the public device. Scanning documents is free of charge with Princh.

Our scan-to-email solution has several unique features. Firstly, the scanned documents are not attached directly to the email we send to users; they are uploaded temporarily to the cloud, and the user receives a link to the stored documents. Secondly, this link to the user’s documents is protected by a unique password which the user themselves creates during the scanning process. Finally, to avoid spamming, the emails are sent from Princh’s email domain instead of your organization’s.

Our copy & scan solution can be run directly on the display screen of certain multifunctional printers (MFPs) or on a tablet connected to the printer. Please note that the printer your organization wishes to use must support AirPrint version 1.4 or newer.

Copying and scanning are only available as a combined package, however we can disable either function depending on your organization’s needs.

You can experience our wizard-based flow by accessing our copy app guide or our scan app guide.

Princh Copying Process

The Princh Administration Panel

The web-based Princh Administration Panel is where your organization can manage all your Princh products. Within the Administration Panel your staff can have different access levels, giving you control over which staff members can access settings such as your prices, adding or removing locations, and more.

Every user will have access to carry out daily tasks, such as releasing print jobs paid for via cash, resending print jobs or enabling and disabling printing from certain printers. Additionally, they will have access to the printing history tab, where they can export and review past printing usage.

Higher level users have access to more options. They can edit location settings, such as opening hours, printing prices, or enabling/disabling our manual release feature, managing the Princh Cloud Connector, or creating more users, among other options.

The Administration Panel also offers simple troubleshooting tools. It notifies staff if your Princh server needs to be restarted, if there is a problem with your printer, like a paper jam or low toner levels, or if documents could not be printed out.

As the central tool for managing Princh products, access to the Administration Panel is included in all our products. And since it is a web-based tool, you are not required to install any new software on your staff PCs.

Unlike the previous interactive guides we linked to, as there are so many different options and use cases in our Administration Panel, our Administration Panel app guide is demonstrating the four most common scenarios in which staff would use the tool.

Princh Administration Panel Examples

Integrated electronic payment

As previously mentioned, electronic payment is truly integrated into our solutions. Since users can pay for their documents on their own devices and because Princh holds the electronic payment agreements, there is nothing to set up on your end. You do not have to worry about setting up kiosks, points of sales (POS) hardware, or third-party agreements – we have it all handled.

Since we hold the payment agreements, we gather the revenue from electronic payments made by your users – but only temporarily. On the 20th after quarter-end we transfer all the funds (minus the electronic payment fee) to your organization, meaning you do not lose out on any revenue from printing and copying. We will also send you an informative account statement when this happens.

We support numerous electronic payment options globally, including, but not limited to: