You keep the system you run today. PressMargin sits beside it and does the one part it does not do: it prices a job from your own paper costs, click charges and labour rates, and then shows you what the job made after it ran. When paper goes up, you change the paper cost once and every price that uses it moves with it.
Get early access$59 a month, for the whole shop. There is nothing to migrate. Your job tickets, your invoicing and your customer records stay where they are.
This is not a list of features that are missing. It is the same three complaints, from shops running the estimating systems that commercial print has been buying for twenty years.
The system quotes the job and invoices the job, and then has no report that puts cost against sales. Labour and hourly rates often are not in the model at all, so margin per job is a thing you work out afterwards in a spreadsheet, if at all.
Paper moves, and updating prices across the system means opening one stock at a time. Shops describe it as the single worst part of the software they own — so in practice the prices go stale and the margin quietly goes with them.
The customer changes the stock or the quantity, and the estimate cannot be adjusted — it has to be rebuilt from the beginning. Repeat work, which should be the easiest money in the shop, costs the same estimating time every round.
Your paper costs, your click charges, your finishing rates and what an hour on each machine costs you. Nothing is estimated from an industry average — the model uses your shop's numbers.
A quote is built from that cost model, so the price you send a customer already knows what the job costs you and what margin it is carrying before you send it.
When a stock goes up 8%, you change it in one place. Every quote and price list built on that stock updates, and you can see which of your standing prices just stopped being profitable.
A full management system for a shop this size costs more than this, and it asks you to move onto it. YoPrint is $69 a month for one user, Printavo is $109, shopVOX is $109 plus $29 for each user, and CoreBridge Starter is $129. PressMargin does one part of what those do, so it costs less than all of them, and you change nothing to try it.
Leave your email and three answers. You will hear directly from the person building it, and telling us it is wrong for your shop is a useful answer.
No, not yet. It is being built, and this page is how the first shops are being found. If you sign up you will hear from the person building it before it opens.
Because you are not replacing it. Changing an estimating system means moving your customers, your price lists and your job history, and most shops decide it is not worth the week it costs. PressMargin asks for none of that. You enter your rates once and you get the cost and margin report your system does not print. If it is not useful you stop paying for it, and the system you run is untouched.
Keep the spreadsheet if all you need is a price. It is free, you built it, and it works. PressMargin answers a different question. A spreadsheet tells you what you quoted. It does not tell you what the job made. To learn that from a spreadsheet, you must type the real hours and the real paper back in, for every job, and then compare the two numbers yourself. No shop does that by hand for a hundred small jobs a month. PressMargin does the comparison for you. If you never want that number, the spreadsheet is the right tool and you should not pay us.
No. Most shops that would use this keep their existing system for job tickets and invoicing, and use PressMargin for the costing and the pricing. It is deliberately narrow.
Both. The cost model handles a click charge and a press hour side by side, because most shops that would buy this run some of each.
Then the margin it shows is wrong, and that is worth knowing. It only uses numbers you enter, so the first useful thing it usually does is show you which of your own rates have not been touched in years.