My Store
Contents
Overview
Mention "Print Store" to printers and they'll tell you that printing is a service, not a product. And they work in a print shop, not a print store. That response, while predictable, is mildly ironic when you consider that the first mass-produced "product" on the planet was the Gutenberg Bible.
Historical footnotes aside, printing really is, for the most part, a service business. Books can legitimately be called products, but few printers publish books. They sell letterheads and catalog sheets and other made-to-order items. And a carton of flyers for ACME Construction is of no use whatsoever to ACME Builders, a point not lost on shop-lifters. Not many print jobs sneak out the door after midnight.
Since we already have My Shop, we'll call this My Store in Morning Flight. Not the brick and mortar kind, but a store in name only. My Store is where you keep track of your customers and manage your products, your paper, your inks.
My Customers
•To add or update a customer, click the My Customers button.
When you need to add several customers all at once, go to File > Add Customers. There you'll find a bulk entry window that will make the process much quicker.
My Products
•To change a product or create a new one, click the My Products button.
When you add a new product, place the highlight bar over a product with properties similar to the one you're creating, before you click the Add button. That way the new product will inherit what's under the highlight bar.
Paper Markups
•Paper markups are divided into quantity bracket rows and category columns. If you're estimating for an in-plant shop and want to eliminate markups altogether, click on the umbrella, then enter zero in all nine markup fields.
•What happens when you check CommonSense Pricing, the little box at the bottom of the My Store window? The program will jump quantity brackets whenever it makes sense to do so.
Say a customer orders 4,500 letterheads. You're charging $18.00 per 1,000 sheets in the less than 5,000 sheet bracket, and $15.00 per 1,000 if the customer orders 5,000 sheets or more. With the box unchecked, the paper bill comes to $81.00 for 4,500 sheets. Had the customer ordered 5,000 letterheads, the bill would have been just $75.00. Turn on CommonSense Pricing, and Morning Flight will charge $75.00 instead of $81.00. The order quantity, of course, will still read 4,500.
See also