Some people like lawyers for example need to be able to invoice their own clients for printouts. To address such needs, CUPS features the possibility to attach a particular billing code to each print job, and of course, PyKota can make use of it.

To use a billing code when printing, you have to pass an additionnal argument to the 'lp' command, for example for a client named 'smith' this could be something like
'lp -o job-billing=smith the_file_to_print.ps'
    
For PyKota to be able to maintain statistics per billing code, you first have to add these billing codes to PyKota's DataBase. This is the main goal of the 'pkbcodes' command line tool.

But 'pkbcodes' also allows you to add a textual description to each billing code, to delete them, to reset billing code specific counters, and finally to list existing billing codes.

With the help of the 'unknown_billingcode' directive in 'pykota.conf', you can decide what happens when a billing code is encountered when printing, and this billing code is not yet in PyKota's DataBase. Automatically adding it to the database is a common choice, which saves time for the PyKota administrator.

Finally, the 'overwrite_jobticket' directive in 'pykota.conf' allows you to overwrite the job billing information at the latest stage of printing, for example if the application used to print doesn't allow end users to give a value to the billing code when submitting the print job.