So were we. It works — right up until you're the only person in the building who can price a job. Printcore takes your numbers once, then anyone on your team can build a quote in seconds, on margins that get truer every month.
Somebody built it. Probably you, probably at night, probably over years. It has your paper costs, your real ink coverage, the markup you actually get away with, and the customer who always gets 10% off. It knows things no software knew when you started.
That's the reason it's hard to leave. It isn't broken. It just has three costs that never show up on a line item.
The formulas live in your head. Nobody else can quote without asking you. That's why quotes go out at 9pm, why a slow week still feels frantic, and why hiring an estimator never quite works — you'd have to teach them a document that only makes sense to you. A shop where one person can quote is a shop with a ceiling on it.
The margin in your spreadsheet is one you assumed — built on estimated hours, and nothing ever checks those hours against the floor. You said four, the job ran seven, and the sheet still says four next time. So the 38% you think you're making on that product is a number nobody has ever verified.
It doesn't become a job. It doesn't become an invoice. It doesn't tell you at month end which products made money and which ones you've been subsidizing. Every one of those is a re-keying job somebody in your shop is doing by hand right now.
A spreadsheet doesn't have a setup cost. It has a setup cost per quote. Every single time, somebody looks up the paper, remembers which markup applies, checks the customer's discount, and doesn't fat-finger a cell. That's not data entry — that's judgment, and it's why the job keeps landing on you.
Printcore asks for that judgment once. You set your rates, your markups, your overhead, your minimums. After that, quoting is picking a substrate and typing a size.
Can the person answering your phone give a customer a real price without walking back to your office? Today the answer is no — and it isn't their fault. The pricing lives in a document only you can read. Once your numbers are in Printcore, the answer is yes. You didn't hire an estimator. You just stopped being the only one.
Not that evening, after everything else is done.
Good, better, best — because it costs seconds, not twenty minutes.
Every shop quietly steers people away from work that isn't worth quoting. That filter disappears.
And the shop still quotes.
The spreadsheet made you good at pricing. It also made you the only one who is. Those are the same fact, and only one of them is worth keeping.
Every shop owner knows their prices. Almost none of them know their margins. Not because they're careless — because knowing would require something to record what each job actually consumed, and compare it to what was quoted. A spreadsheet can't do that. It has no idea the job ever ran.
Printcore does it automatically. Every operation on the floor is timed against its estimate, and the engine corrects that estimate for next time. No template tuning, no maintenance, nobody assigned to keep it honest. Patent pending
Month one, you're quoting on solid industry starting points and your own invoice history. Month six, you're quoting on what your shop actually does — your press, your crew, your setup times, your rework. That's a number no competitor can look up and no consultant can hand you.
Profitability reporting reads real recorded cost against real revenue and tells you which products and customers are carrying the shop and which are riding along. Most shops have a beloved bread-and-butter job that turns out to be subsidized by something else. It's usually not the one you'd guess.
And once you know your true floor, you can hold your price. Most small shops discount out of uncertainty — they don't know how low is too low, so they flinch early. Knowing the real number tells you exactly when to hold, when to sharpen the pencil, and when to let the job walk.
Not the price. Not the features. The three weekends. You've watched somebody in this industry buy a system, spend two months loading it, and go back to the spreadsheet anyway. Reasonable fear — so here's specifically what's different.
Type "two Roland 64-inch printers, a Summa cutter, HP Indigo, laminator, three production guys" and the setup assistant turns that into your equipment stations, with its confidence and reasoning shown so you can correct it instead of typing it.
Connect QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, FreshBooks, NetSuite, Wave or your CRM and Printcore reads your history to suggest pricing that looks like what you already charge. You're confirming a price list, not inventing one. On every plan, and bidirectional — approved quotes flow back out as invoices.
Sales tax defaults for your region. A starter substrate list, job templates and products. An overhead estimator that gets you to a defensible shop rate. A live supplier catalog you can pull real material costs from.
Open a brand-new account, go to any of the six quoting modules, put a job in — you get a number. Not a setup screen. The rates it opens with are generic industry starters and the app says so on screen until you replace them. That's the difference between evaluating something and configuring something.
No server, no IT, no workstation licenses, no data migration project. It's a browser. Your phone works too — the floor updates job status from theirs.
Reports export. Point-in-time restore undoes any operation from the past week, and you can pull a full backup whenever you want. There's no hostage situation.
Company details, region, your equipment in plain English. Confirm what the assistant got right.
Pricing suggestions come back shaped like your own invoices. Adjust the ones that look off. Skip it entirely if you'd rather price from scratch.
Pick something you quoted last week and run it through. If the numbers are close, the system understands your shop. If they're not, you found the setting to fix in the first hour instead of the third month.
Then do nothing else. Quote your next few jobs both ways, with the spreadsheet still open in the other tab. Turn on the customer portal when you're tired of chasing approvals. Turn on the floor board when you're tired of the whiteboard. Turn on production timers when you want to know why that job ran seven hours. None of it is required to get a quote out.
For the first two weeks, quote every job twice — once in your spreadsheet, once in Printcore. It costs a couple of extra minutes per quote and it removes the entire risk of the decision.
At the end of two weeks you'll know three things you can't know today:
Fails any of those and you're out two weeks of small effort and no money — the trial is 30 days and doesn't take a card. Passes all three and you already have your answer, without having to trust a demo to get it.
That's the right instinct, and it's why the first thing we ask you to do is re-quote a job you already priced. You're not being asked to trust the software — you're being asked to check it against a number you already know is correct. Every rate, markup, overhead multiplier and minimum is yours to set. Six quoting modules cover wide format, digital press, offset, booklets, vehicle wraps, cut vinyl and channel letter, each with its own real cost chain. And until you've saved your own numbers, the quote screen tells you outright that it's using generic industry rates, so you always know which prices are yours and which aren't.
The same day. Most of the first hour is describing your shop and confirming pricing that was suggested from your own invoice history. Getting everything else configured — portals, production routing, inventory thresholds — takes longer, and it's deliberately optional. You can quote before any of it.
You know your quoted margins — what the job was supposed to make. The question is whether anything in your shop checks that against what the job actually consumed once it hit the floor. If nothing does, then every margin you have is an assumption that has been compounding for years. Printcore times each operation against its estimate, so the margin on the quote and the margin in reality slowly become the same number.
Then you'll find that out during the free trial instead of after you've paid. That's the point of running it alongside the spreadsheet for the first two weeks. It's browser-based and works on a phone, which is usually the difference — the floor updates job status from their pocket rather than walking to a terminal.
Most of those systems were built to be configured by a consultant. This one was built by a print shop owner who was quoting out of a spreadsheet at 9pm and wanted to stop. That's a different design goal, and it shows up mostly in what you don't have to do before it's useful.
Keep it. Archive it. Nobody at Printcore will ever know. It's a good spreadsheet — it's just the last one you'll need to maintain by hand.
Two plans, and both include unlimited team members and a 30-day free trial that doesn't ask for a card. Pro adds the AI quoting tools, customer portals, and the production side — timers, scheduling, and the reports that come from real recorded time. Get in touch and we'll tell you which one fits your shop and what it costs.
Pick a job you priced last week, run it through Printcore, and see whether it agrees with you. Thirty days free, no card, and your spreadsheet stays right where it is. The quote takes seconds. The margin behind it gets truer every month you keep going.
Start free — no credit card 30 days free · No card · Nothing to install