When comparing the totals available in PaperCut MF and Intuitive, you may notice some slight differences with how the totals have been calculated, filtered and displayed.
If we take a look at the PaperCut Reports, they have quite a large sample size of different configurations of reports. It can be easy to get lost in the number of available reports to compare against Intuitive, but you should be able to find the contents of these reports in each of the Intuitive dashboards by applying different types / combinations of filters.
Since each of the PaperCut reports has a specific objective, there isn’t much in the way of any additional configuration to answer specific customer questions. This is where the power of the Intuitive dashboards comes into play, as the pre-built dashboards are designed to be explored, filtered and analysed in a much deeper way.
However, when comparing the reports, one area to consider is how you compare the report timeframes. When Intuitive refreshes, we view data on a rolling 12-24 month basis. Typically most of the dashboards look at data from the last 12 months unless stated otherwise. Meaning, when we view a rolling 12 month timeframe, it’s a rolling 12 months from the point of the last data refresh.
However, if you are comparing the PaperCut MF reports, typically when you select a timeframe of one day to the next, the logic behind that selection is from the start of the day from your first date, to the end of the day on your end date. This means that a selection of the "Last 30 days” is a selection of the start of the day 30 days ago, to the exact moment you generated the report.
For example, if ‘today’ is the 8th of January 2025 at 11:13 am, a report of “Last 30 days” will have the date range of December the 9th 2024 at 12 am to January the 8th 2025 at 11:13 am. This is a selection is 30 ‘whole’ days and change – 11 hours and 13 minutes to be exact.
With all that in mind, the key point to take away is that to effectively compare the Intuitive and PaperCut MF statistics, you must present the two with the exact same conditions, akin to any other scientific analysis. If you present the two solutions with different starting environments you will end up with different results.