Overview

 

In the fall of 2016 when we had the new Skypricer pretty much in the can - with five click charges instead of one - we felt we had to offer tiered click charges in all other paid editions as well. That single price point was no longer tenable. How long could it take to code the update? Not long, maybe a month. So we announced it. The response, predictably, was "Outstanding! So will it include wide format?" Well, why not. I mean, we had the pricing engine apart anyway, and industry surveys told us that half of all small print shops now offered wide format.

This is where the train went off the track. First and foremost, we should have kept quiet about wide format and released V17.1 as soon as those versions had the tiered click charges. Second, it would have been quicker to develop wide format as a separate entity instead of trying to shoehorn it into the existing data structures. Less stress, and definitely more revenue than the $50 to which we now limit all inline updates. We even debated about that, seeing we've never charged for updates in our 13-year history.

In the end, it wasn't much of a debate. The new Morning Flight had taken a year and a half to produce and had grown to nearly twice its original size and usefulness. I knew none of that would amount to a hill of beans in the debate about whether to update. Nor, in all honesty, should it. The real question is value. Is the update worth $50? I ask myself that every time I order a $49.95 computer book from Amazon. Was it worth burning the midnight oil to integrate wide format into the existing data structures? Totally. It keeps everything together and is so much simpler.
 

Updating to Version 17.3

If you have already updated to Version 17.1 or 17.2 and you now want to update to 17.3 (you should, it's free and you get two more digital presses, among other things):

•Back up your Morning Flight data files (files with the extension TPS). The location of those files will depend on your operating system and whether you have disabled Windows UAC Virtualization. Backing up your Data

•Install the update into your active Morning Flight directory (C:\Program Files\PrintFire\MorningFlight by default).

If you're updating from any Morning Flight version older than V17, follow the steps below:
 
Updating to Version 17

Version 17 is more than an update, it's a new program. Some of the screens still look and work the same, but there are countless new ones to support the added capabilities now found in all paid editions. To name just a few: Wide format, five-tier click charges, support for RISO and Xante presses, and market pricing. Except for the tiered click charges (without which there would be no market pricing), updates are still managed hands-off by the setup file. However, reverse-engineering five click rates from just one is too much to ask of the robots. Getting it wrong could decimate your sales if the new pricing is too high, or wipe out your profits if it's too low.

Converting that single click rate to five has been a huge challenge from day one. New users are easy because there's nothing to convert. We're entering virgin territory. Existing installations are more like a vegetable garden. Here we could easily be trampling all over somebody's carefully cultivated pricing structure. This one kept me up at night. I knew we couldn't make drastic changes regardless of the cautionary "But First" link in the Read Me file. Nobody ever reads those things anyway until the carnage is well underway.

Late in 2017 we found the solution, a fairly elegant one at that. New installations would continue to emerge with market prices. But updates would extract the press factors from the earlier version and import those values into the update. Nothing new about that, it's common practice. What's unusual is that the single click rate from the earlier version is being loaded into all five V17 tiers, keeping the update essentially a one-tier program. That hardly looks like progress, more like a step back. And it would be if we hadn't added our 'Aha' ingredient - the ability to go online and look up the press factors that will give you market pricing.

You now have a choice: Stay with Cost-Plus; forget about market pricing altogether and keep Morning Flight a one-tier program. That's likely to still hurt your sales (orders you're already not getting because some of your quotes are overpriced), and lower your profits (orders you are getting but at too low a price which most customers are savvy enough to not be telling you).

Or, move ahead slow and measured, one step at a time. Where you feel comfortable, gradually inch your press rates to what we publish on our website. That's the path I would take if I still owned the Unitac print shop. One of the unseen benefits of version 17 is the built-in market price guide for digital and wide format. We've spent a lot of time and money to bring you that, and it would be a shame to not take advantage of it.
 

The Fast Track

•Take a picture or a screen capture, or write on a slip of paper your digital press rates in the old version, the one you're using now. Hourly rates (front and back) and click charges (1C and 4C) are the values you want to preserve. If you added presses, save the rates for those presses, too.

•Take a picture or a screen capture, or write on a slip of paper your paper markups as displayed in My Store.

•Make sure you have printouts of estimates and job tickets for your most common digital work, priced with the old version.

•Back up your Morning Flight data files (files with the extension TPS). The location of those files will depend on your operating system and whether you have disabled Windows UAC Virtualization. Backing up your Data

•Install the V17 update into the folder from which you're running the old version (C:\Program Files\PrintFire\MorningFlight by default). When the new version has loaded, go to My Shop and double-click the 4C digital press. If all has gone well, you should see something similar to the screen below. I say should because with MS Windows and UAC and compatibility files you're never sure. Doesn't matter. If the update does somehow install the new market price defaults but you want your old single click charge back, enter it manually into all five tiers, using the values you wrote down on that slip of paper.

 

 

The Slow Road

•Save the setup.exe you downloaded from the Morning Flight Shop. We don't limit how often you can install updates.

•For a week or two, install the new version into a folder that's different from the folder holding your old version. You could even install it on a flash drive.

•Keep generating your estimates and orders on the old version, but at the same time experiment with the pricing of V17 (hourly rates, click charges and paper markups) until you have a set of numbers you can live with.

•When you're done experimenting, save those numbers on a slip of paper.

•Back up the data files of your old version, then install the V17 update into the old version folder.

•Manually update the digital presses and paper markups of the just updated program, using the numbers you saved on the slip of paper.
 

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Hourly Rate and Tiered Click Charge Defaults.
January 2018

 

Paper Markup Defaults
January 2018

 

See also
 

Backing up your Data       Before you dive in

 

 

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