Flow Print System
Your shop's pricing, decoded and running.
We pull the estimating rules out of your spreadsheets, your history and your legacy system, and put them in software your people can audit. Every quote prices on your presses, your paper and your rates. One record carries it from the customer's email to the invoice.
Measured, not claimed
Historical quotes reproduced to the cent, using zero fitted constants. The engine was built from the shop's own rules, not fitted to its answers.
Pieces on a live job where the system matched the estimator's own spreadsheet to the penny, at $6.66 per thousand.
Found on one 8-version web job, by imposing the versions onto forms better than the hand layout did.
The demo is the same test. Send 10 quotes you wrote last year. We price them and compare line by line, in front of you.
The problem
We have been quoting the same way since 1987.
A spreadsheet one person built. A price out of somebody's memory. The job retyped four times between the quote and the invoice, and no record of what you won, what you lost, or why.
The estimator who holds it all together is 5 years from retiring, and none of it is written down.
What the system decides
It prices the job on every press that can run it.
Presses that cannot hold the roll or the basis weight drop out of the compare. For versioned work it imposes the versions onto forms, prices every form count, and takes the one that costs least. Then it tells you when that layout overprints more paper than your rule allows, so the call stays yours.
A real 8-version job, 4-up on a heatset web. 451,667 sheets across 4 forms. The estimator's hand layout ran 460,000 and the shop's old system ran 475,000. The difference is about $1,000 on one quote.
The cost nobody counts
What does a quote cost you, and what does a win cost you?
Every shop knows its cost per thousand impressions. Almost none of them know what it costs to produce a quote, or how much of that cost is carried by the orders that actually land. Put your own numbers in.
Move the win rate 3 points and that last number drops to $740 per order, on the same spend.
Hours and pay rates are estimates you control. The point is the shape of it. A quote that loses consumed a real hour of a real person, produced nothing, and was never counted as scrap. The shop measures spoilage on the press to the sheet and measures nothing at the quote desk.
How it prices
Your presses, your stock, your cost structure.
Every number the shop prices on lives on a card you control. Nothing is a model's opinion, and nothing is a constant buried in code.
Press and makeready rates
Hourly rates, run speeds, makeready hours per added form, waste ladders, roll widths and basis limits, per press.
Paper and ink
Buy and sell by hundredweight or by skid, ink coverage by job type, spoilage by quantity.
Prepress and bindery
Plates and proofs per set or per version, folding, cutting, stitching, shrink wrap, per-pack charges.
Freight and margin
Zones, methods, markups by customer, and the discount rules your shop actually applies.
Changed in 30 seconds
Paper went up 3% in November. Open the card, change the number, and every quote after it uses the new one.
Nothing hard-coded
Your shop's quirks are configuration. That is what makes the second shop an onboarding, not a rewrite.
One record
From their email to your invoice, typed once.
Paste the customer's request into intake and a client-facing quote comes back in under a minute. That same record becomes everything downstream.
Documents your shop already uses
The client quote letter carrying the customer's own RFQ number. A one-page internal cost summary for the file. The ticket showing what runs on which form. The packing slip with skid count and gross weight, and no prices on it.
Nobody keys an invoice twice
The invoice preview shows what will be billed, and the QuickBooks import file carries it across. Invoice numbers still come from QuickBooks, because that is where they belong.
What the shop learns
A quote desk has three jobs. Most shops can only measure one.
You know what you quoted. Whether you won it, why you lost it, and whether it was worth chasing are usually somebody's impression.
If you own the shop
- Win rate by customer and by channel: broker, broker network, direct, mailer, trade printer.
- Dollars quoted against dollars won, counted at the price you quoted.
- Dollars per press hour, so you can see which work is worth the floor time.
- Which accounts are growing and which have quietly stopped calling.
- Paper on hand, on order, committed to live orders, and merely spoken for by estimates.
- Plain-language questions against your own quote history, answered from your data.
If you write the quotes
- The last three jobs like this one, on screen while you price: date, price, size, stock, colors, won or lost.
- What this customer has said yes to, and at what number.
- Where the price actually went: press, forms, plates, makeready, paper, cutter.
- A follow-up clock, so a live quote never ages out at the bottom of the pile.
- A layout you can check, and change, before it goes out.
Why it matters
A quote that loses is a defective part.
Estimating is a workstation like any other on your floor. It has throughput, it has scrap, and it builds a queue. A losing quote consumed the same hour as a winning one and shipped nothing. Software that only makes the number come out faster is a machine that produces scrap faster.
Estimating's job is to win profitable work. Most estimating departments are set up to avoid losing money instead. An estimator with a spreadsheet and a deadline produces a number safe enough that the job will not lose money on press, which is reasonable when it is the only information he has. It is also why quotes go out priced from memory, why the one due next Tuesday sinks to the bottom of the pile, and why nobody can say what the shop wins or why.
More quotes out, and more of them win
Every quote is written against what this customer has paid before and what the shop has actually won, so the number has a reason behind it instead of a margin of safety.
The queue stops growing
Quotes that used to wait days go out the same day, and the one nobody chased shows up on a follow-up list instead of expiring quietly.
Hours come back
The time that went into rebuilding a spreadsheet, retyping the job into the order system and chasing paper is time your people can spend selling or running the floor.
Better work reaches the presses
The plant gets jobs priced on the press that should run them, at a number that holds when the ink goes down. The layout is decided before the job is on the schedule, not on the floor.
Where your numbers go
Nowhere.
No shared model
Your rates, your customers and your win rates are yours alone. Nothing you price here trains anything that quotes for another printer.
No print network
We do not sell print, broker print, or route work. We have no customers who buy print, so we are never bidding against you.
A price you can take apart
Every quote shows the press, the forms, the plates, the makeready, the paper and the cutter line. When it is wrong, you can see why and fix the card.
Running today
In production at a commercial printer in the Chicago suburbs.
Web and sheetfed, three estimators writing real quotes in it since September 2026.
Live
Estimating, quoting, orders, job tickets, packing slips, invoice preview and QuickBooks export. Paper inventory. Customer intel and dashboards. Email intake to a client-facing quote.
Being built
In-app support requests, re-pricing an order in place, a paper price list fed from the supplier, and quoting from a phone call rather than an email.
What it has to earn
It pays for itself twice, or it is not worth buying.
On the way out
The customer who gets a real price today instead of Thursday is a customer who is comparing you against whoever else has answered. Speed only counts when the number is right, and this number is built from your own rates.
On the way in
Pricing against your own history means fewer jobs quoted high enough to lose and low enough to hurt. One 8-version job priced on a better layout was worth $1,000 by itself. That is the shape of the return.
Pricing
No per-seat charges, no module fees, no training fees, and nothing extra for future modules. Onboarding is a person decoding your shop, not a login and a manual.
Try it yourself
Walk a job from estimate to invoice, tonight, without talking to anyone.
The demo is a working shop with its own presses, paper and customers. Write a quote on it, send it, convert it to an order, add a packing slip and preview the invoice. It takes about 20 minutes and nobody has to show you how.
1. Write a quote
Pick a customer, enter the specs, and watch it price on every press in the shop's fleet.
2. Send it and convert it
The client quote PDF, then the order, carrying everything you already entered.
3. Ship it and bill it
The job ticket, the packing slip with skid count and weight, and the invoice preview.
The demo shop's rates are sample numbers, not any real shop's. Yours are decoded from your own spreadsheets during onboarding, which is what the 10-quote test below is for.
Start here
Send 10 quotes you already wrote.
We price them in the system and walk the differences with you, line by line. If the numbers do not hold up, you have lost an hour and learned something about your own pricing. If they do, you know exactly what you are buying.