Why I built Voucher Manager: printing hotspot vouchers on RouterOS 7

25 October 2026 · 4 min read

If you run a Wi-Fi hotspot on a MikroTik router, you sell access with vouchers: small printed cards with a username and password. A customer pays, gets a card, and logs in.

On RouterOS 7 this should be a five-minute job. In practice it is not. That is why I built Voucher Manager, a small Windows app that does the whole job in one click.

What changed in RouterOS 7

In RouterOS 7, MikroTik rebuilt User Manager from scratch. It uses a new database, new menus and new commands, and old setups have to be migrated across (MikroTik docs).

The new web page at /um/ is for customers. They can check their usage and buy a plan. It is not a tool for an operator who wants to print 50 vouchers before the evening rush. For that, you go back to the command line.

The five steps RouterOS 7 makes you do

To get one sheet of printable vouchers, you have to do all of this:

Create the users. One /user-manager user add per user, with a name, password and group. There is also an add-batch-users command that makes random users in bulk, but it does not do the next steps for you.
Give every user a plan. A user is linked to a profile (for example "1 day" or "1 week") with a separate command, once per user:
```
/user-manager user-profile add user=abc123 profile=1-day
```
Generate the vouchers. Run generate-voucher on exactly the users you just made, and name a voucher template that you have already uploaded to the router's Files:
```
/user-manager user generate-voucher numbers=*1,*2,*3 voucher-template=printable_vouchers.html
```
Find the output. The router writes an HTML file to um5files/PRIVATE/GENERATED/vouchers/gen_printable_vouchers.html. To open it in a browser, you first need to set a private web username and password in User Manager's advanced settings. Otherwise you copy it off the router another way, such as FTP.
Print it. Open the HTML file and print it, or save it as a PDF.

None of these steps is hard alone. Together, done by hand for every batch, they are slow and easy to get wrong.

Where it goes wrong

Forgetting a profile. A user with no profile attached has no plan, so the card you hand over may not work as sold.
Generating for the wrong users. generate-voucher needs the internal IDs of the right users. Pick the wrong ones and you print old cards again, or miss new ones.
The file is not ready yet. Right after generate-voucher returns, the HTML file may still be being written. Try to download it too early and you get an error.
Typing plan names by hand. One typo in a profile name and the command fails halfway, leaving some users created and others not.

What Voucher Manager does instead

Voucher Manager talks to the router through its API (port 8728, or 8729 with TLS) and runs every step in order:

Test Connection checks your login before anything runs.
Refresh loads your user groups and profiles straight from the router, so you pick them from a list instead of typing them.
It creates each user, attaches the profile you chose, and keeps the ID the router returns.
It runs generate-voucher on exactly those IDs, using your template.
It downloads the HTML file over FTP, and retries a few times if the file is not ready yet.
It turns the file into a PDF with Microsoft Edge or Chrome, ready to print.

If something fails halfway, it still saves a list of the users it already created next to your PDF. Nothing is left on the router without a record.

You can make up to 500 vouchers per batch, with an optional username prefix so you can tell batches apart.

What I learned

Read the API, not just the menus. The RouterOS API returns the ID of every user you create. Keeping those IDs is what makes "generate vouchers for exactly this batch" reliable.
Plan for slow hardware. Routers are small computers. Waiting and retrying is part of the design, not a bug fix.
Ship it properly. I set up a GitHub Actions pipeline that builds a Windows installer and a portable .exe, with SHA256 checksums, every time I tag a release. People who are not developers can install it like any other app.

Try it

Voucher Manager is free and open source. It needs Windows 10 or 11, and your router needs the API and FTP services turned on, a voucher template in Files, and at least one profile and user group.

If you run a MikroTik hotspot and try it, I would like to hear how it goes.