Printpak 4.2 is coming out this weekend

After months and months of ‘are we nearly there?’, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The much-awaited version Printpak 4.2 should be coming out this weekend. The goodies contained in the package are so many that I’m not even going to attempt to enumerate them, but they include job costing and cost absorption (both included even in the free community edition), stock control and full purchase order processing, together with a load of fixes and enhancements. The main menu has been overhauled too, to reduce the clutter.

The reason for including job costing in even the free version is that we think that these days it’s getting increasingly vital to identify which jobs to walk away from. To provide accurate costs for a few jobs is vital so you can see whether your quoting is accurate. The problem is that the administrative load of entering the actual cost of each job is too much for many busy printers.

One of our users in Wales came up with an interesting solution to this – he said “why don’t you just cost one in ten jobs?” He went on to explain “You just need to mark with a yellow highlighter all jobsheets with the job number ending in zero. Then you tell the people on the shop floor that if their jobsheet is highlighted, they have to write on it their ‘actuals’ (i.e. the actual time taken, and actual stock used).” The downside of this is that any highlighted jobsheet will tend to take longer to work its way through production as people will try to avoid picking it up! In this way it’s possible to get a completely accurate costing of an exact ten percent sample, which is good enough!