A miscalculated print run, a forgotten makeready surcharge, a substrate price that was current six months ago - and your print shop is already working on an order that ultimately makes no profit. For many small and medium-sized printing companies, calculation is one of the most critical and at the same time most underestimated processes in the company. This article shows why manual pricing involves systematic risks, what professional calculation software has to do and how PrintDesk as integrated printing software secures the entire calculation process.
Many printing companies today still calculate using Excel tables, handwritten notes or outdated spreadsheets that have grown over the years. This works – as long as the prices remain stable, the employees know their stuff and no orders with special specifications appear. In practice, these conditions are rarely all met at the same time.
The printing industry works with a multitude of variables: paper weights, surface finishes, different printing processes, fluctuating energy costs, seasonal differences in workload and individual customer requirements. If you want to reconcile all of this manually, you not only need experience, but also a lot of time - and you still make mistakes.
The most common calculation errors in printing companies follow a recurring pattern. Here are the most critical ones:
A single calculation error for a small order over 500 euros may be manageable. But imagine that 15% of your orders are calculated with a margin that is too low - because the Excel table was not up to date, because an employee was on vacation and the replacement was uncertain, or because a field was forgotten under time pressure. With an annual turnover of one million euros, this corresponds to a potential margin risk in the five to six figure range.
Practical example: A medium-sized printing company with 12 employees calculated flyer runs using a standard rate for makeready times. After introducing an automated calculation solution, it turned out that 18% of the actual makeready costs were systematically not billed for runs of less than 500 pieces - a six-figure loss over three years.
Not every software that calls itself "calculation software" is suitable for use in a printing company. The requirements of the printing industry are specific enough that standard solutions from other industries regularly fail. Here are the core functions that a professional solution must have.
Every calculation begins with the material. A powerful calculation software for printing companies makes it possible to store substrates with exact purchase prices, format sizes, grammages and processing properties. If the purchase price for a paper changes, this value is updated centrally - and all future calculations that use this substrate automatically calculate with the new value.
This sounds obvious, but in practice it is a crucial difference from the Excel world, where prices are often maintained redundantly in several tables and inconsistencies arise unnoticed.
The machine costs of a printing company are complex: hourly rates, depreciation, energy costs, maintenance costs - all of this flows into the machine hourly rate. In addition, there are order-specific makeready times, which can vary significantly depending on the printing process, format and number of colors.
Professional calculation software stores machine hourly rates per device and automatically calculates the set-up time based on defined parameters. The person responsible for the calculation does not have to have any formulas in mind - the software knows the rules and applies them consistently.
Print customers usually ask about several print runs at the same time: "How much does it cost for 250, 500 and 1,000 copies?" Anyone who calculates these graduated prices manually takes several times as much time - and makes potential mistakes at every step. Good calculation software calculates all scales from one calculation model at the same time, shows unit costs and total prices side by side and enables quick customer communication.
The transition from calculation to offer is another critical point. Anyone who calculates and then creates an offer manually in Word or another system opens up a new source of error. Ideally, the calculation is integrated directly into the quotation process: complete the calculation, generate an offer with one click – done.
Calculation is not an isolated process. It is the first step in a chain that leads from the offer to the order confirmation to the invoice. Every interruption in this chain costs time and opens up the possibility of errors. An integrated approach means: The numbers from the calculation flow directly into the offer, the offer automatically becomes an order when the order is placed, and the invoice is created from the order - without having to re-enter data.
For the Order management In the print shop this means: less manual work, fewer transmission errors, more transparency about the status of each order. Employees can immediately see which calculation is based on an order, can readjust and have all relevant figures in one place.
See how PrintDesk calculates your print prices automatically and error-free in a personal demo.
Request a demoPrintDesk is as Print MIS software designed to cover all the central processes of a printing company - and the calculation is a fully integrated component, not an additional module. This means: Material prices, machine hourly rates and product configurations are stored once and are then consistently available for every calculation, every offer and every order.
Linking calculation, quotation, order management and invoicing in one system eliminates the dangerous media disruptions that lead to small and large errors in many print shops every day. Instead of having five different tables and programs open, everyone involved works in a uniform interface.
The Calculation function in PrintDesk offers the following core services for printing companies:
In addition, PrintDesk offers export functions for calculations, a historization of previous price versions and a search function with which similar previous orders can be used as a calculation template. This saves a significant amount of time for recurring products.
Manual calculation is an avoidable risk in modern printing. The complexity of print production - fluctuating material prices, run-dependent makeready times, individual machine costs and the need for quick quotation creation - requires software that reliably processes these variables and translates them into consistent prices.
PrintDesk offers exactly that: a fully integrated calculation that does not work as an isolated tool, but is part of a continuous workflow from inquiry to invoice. Whoever is in a professional today Printing software invests, protects its margin, saves time and can supply customers faster and more reliably than the competition.
Would you like to see how PrintDesk meets your specific costing needs? Request a personal demo– we will show you the solution based on your own products and price structures.
Web-to-print automation for modern print shops. A product from Druckhaus interactive GmbH.