First Look Review: SEPIALINE 6.2-Capture Business Expenses

Allocate expenses by tracking office equipment activity

The Sepialine Cost Recovery Suite is designed to capture, analyze and report office activity, including print, copy, scan and fax output. It's available for Windows and the Macintosh. By capturing business expenses, users can assign costs to a client for a specific job or group of jobs and allocate costs for specific projects within a business. Sepialine works on a stand-alone workstation or across a network to track resource use for a variety of devices.

Installation is relatively straightforward, with four options available during installation: Database, Manager, Server (for network installations) and Configure. The configuration option provides the ability to configure local printers, workstations and groups of devices. After installation, each time one of the devices is used, a dialog box pops up to indicate the job and provide the option to enter billing information, project name, phase of the project, status and optional comments. This can be deferred for a brief time while doing batch operations so data doesn't have to be entered after each operation.

The data entered is stored in the database, along with costs per print and the client for billing, providing an excellent way to track data related to a job. It's easy to generate reports that show the status of a particular job or client. Sepialine is well designed and easy to install and configure, with lots of little touches that make it easy to use—important in an application intended for constant use in a work environment.

Sepialine v6.2 monitors all printing devices and groups of printers.

Sepialine v6.2 includes a variety of new features and capabilities. The Sepialine Print Tracking component now has billing code visibility, providing access to billing codes by user or user group, and device grouping to organize devices into any number of groups for high-level configuration and reporting.

Sepialine Copy + Fax Tracking 6.2 adds fax support, capturing the cost of fax activity on a per-page or per-time basis. It works through the Sepialine Copy Tracking Pro terminal ($2,995 for a single device; supports up to three devices per terminal at additional charge), a touch-screen hardware and software terminal. The entry-level Express Terminal supports copiers and starts at $1,495 per unit. Sepialine also offers optional hardware devices that tie into its workflow.

Sepialine 6.2

In addition to being flexible and accurate, the Sepialine Cost Recovery Suite 6.2 is scalable to any office size.