How I Price Screen Printing

I literally grew up in a screen printing shop that my parents owned.  I can remember watching my mom crunch numbers every time a potential customer came in the front door or called on the phone. It never failed, mom would finish the bid and the customer would say, “How much if we only do two colors?”, and the adding machine would lite up again while mom ran through the same calculations again with fewer colors.

Years ago, when I started my own screen printing shop, the same process was a familiar part of my day. Eventually the calculations moved to an excel spreadsheet, but it was still a drag on my time. I had already sat down and figured out the value of each hour during my work day. I wanted to know how much I had to sell each day to keep my shop running. You divide that number by how many hours in your work day and you know the value of your time. According to those numbers, spending an hour a day working up quotes for my customers was costing me over $10,000 a year!  Surely technology could give me a more efficient way to build quotes than how my mom did it.

I began the search for something better. There are a few software packages out there that include price quoting, but they are also bloated with features I didn’t need. And the price tag! Thousands of dollars a year? There had to be something more affordable that I could setup to give me a simple quote AND fit into my budget. There wasn’t.

That is why I decided to do what I’ve done many times in my shop – build it myself. I’ve had to work with software and web developers in the past on different projects – this web site is one of them – so, I struck out on a long process of development and revisions. Almost one year later, I am using it; PrintShop Quoter.

Not only can I use it in my shop to build quotes for my customers while they are either standing in my office or on the other end of the phone, but my customers can visit my website and get a quote for their orders on their own and I get a copy of the quote emailed to me. I tell PrintShop Quoter my costs for shirts, what I charge per color, screen charge, mark up, etc, and it does all the computations for me. If I want to run a sale, then I make a global price change and the quoter makes it happen. The whole thing is web based, so I can use it from anywhere in the world via a web enabled device (iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobil, etc).  When I bump into a customer at the grocery store, instead of saying, “I’ll give you a call.” when asked me about a shirt order, I can pull out my smart phone and quote a price.

Now that I’ve built it, I am happy to offer it to other screen printers who have experienced the same frustrations that I have. PrintShop Quoter is now FREE.