27 www.printmonthly.co.uk Issue 360 - May | June 2026 A quoting system isn’t about turning your shop into a corporate operation. It’s about buying back your own hours and protecting your margin. It’s the difference between running a business and just being busy. The moment you democratise that data, the moment you give your team the ability to produce accurate, consistent quotes without needing to come and find you for every job that walks through the door, you’ve taken the first real step toward a business that doesn’t depend entirely on you. The reality is the tools available today aren’t the clunky, six-figure installations they used to be. Products like Accura, Clarity, and PrintLogic are designed specifically for businesses your size. They don’t need a dedicated IT team to run. They need someone willing to put in the groundwork to set them up properly. Start Small, Stay Consistent, Measure Everything Here’s a 90-day plan that I’ve seen work time and again. In the first two weeks, identify your top 20 products. Not your entire catalogue. Just the items that make up the majority 350gsm silk with a matt laminate, you’re not starting from scratch every time. You’re selecting a template, adjusting the specifics, and producing a consistent, accurate quote in minutes. Second, you introduce time-based costing. Every machine in your shop has a cost per hour to run. Every finishing process takes a measurable amount of time. When those numbers are built into your system, you stop guessing what a job costs to produce and start knowing. That shift alone changes the way you price. Third, you track materials and finishes properly. Stock costs fluctuate. Finishing prices change. If your quotes are based on what you remember paying for a laminate six months ago rather than what it actually costs today, you’re leaving profit on the table every single time. Then there’s the process around the quote itself. A proper system gives you approval workflows, so quotes go out checked and consistent. It handles deposit requests upfront, so you’re not carrying all the risk – it keeps a full job history, so when a repeat customer comes back for the same order they placed in March, you can pull it up in seconds rather than trying to remember what you charged them. You Don’t Need to Be Big Enough for a System. You Need a System to Get Bigger This is the objection I hear most often: “We’re too small for an MIS” or “We’ve only got eight people; we don’t need all that.” I understand the hesitation. The word “system” sounds expensive, complicated, and like something designed for businesses much larger than yours. But let me reframe that for you. If you’re the person who holds all the pricing knowledge in your head, you are the single point of failure in your business. If you go on holiday and your phone starts ringing with questions about how to price a job, you don’t have a structured business. You have a business that can’t function without you in the room. of your revenue. These are the ones worth getting right first. Over the next month, configure your system around those 20 products. Build the templates. Input your actual costs, your machine rates, your material prices. Resist the urge to customise everything to perfection before you start using it. Configure before you customise. Get the foundations right and refine as you go. From day 30, start quoting every one of those top 20 products through the system – no exceptions. If you let people bypass it for the “quick jobs” or the “easy ones,” you don’t have a process. You have a preference, and preferences don’t protect your margin. At 90 days, pull a margin report. Compare what you quoted against what the jobs actually cost to produce. I guarantee you’ll find jobs where you were undercharging. You’ll find products where the margin was thinner than you assumed and you’ll have the data to do something about it. That’s the shift. From guessing to knowing. From reactive to proactive. From cigarette-packet pricing to genuine profit control. The Conversation That Starts It None of this is complicated. But it does require a decision to stop doing things the way you’ve always done them. The owners who make that shift, who put in the groundwork and enforce the process, are the ones who stop bleeding money on jobs they should be profiting from. If you’re ready to move from guessing to knowing and want a straight-talking conversation about where to start, get in touch. INDUSTRY TIPS | THE ONLINE PRINT COACH If you’re the person who holds all the pricing knowledge in your head, you are the single point of failure in your business
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