Pricelist for Customer

[Keith]

Hal, I have a customer that wants a pricelist. Not a problem with Merchandise. But, this is stuff I would be printing in house and I would like to be able to track the paper usage and other features that come with the job ticket. Is there a way I can shoe horn that in so the price stays constant and doesn't bounce around whenever I tweak MF? Or should I stop my tweaking? He's the only customer of mine that is whining for a pricelist. It's a wholesale customer. The only idea I had so far was to create a product using his name and price and we can adjust MF when the numbers don't match up.

PITA customers.

Thanks Hal,
Keith

[Hal Heindel]

Originally Posted by Keith

... this is stuff I would be printing in house and I would like to be able to track the paper usage and other features that come with the job ticket.

Hi Keith,

You may already be doing this, but if you're not: Paper usage and time spent on the press can be entered into the Flight Engineer under Operations > Record Job Data, based on what the press operator recorded on the job ticket.

Now, about having MF create a price list. If you read our company bio at www.unitac.com, you know I used to be a huge fan of price lists. Right up to 1996. By then, most of our printing customers had acquired PCs. We continued to publish our price list that year, but no longer on paper. Thanks to the widespead use of computers, it now was much more than that. In addition to a do-it-yourself price calculator, there were pages and pages of guides on everything from designing a printed piece to why you should publish a monthly newsletter. All in DOS, crammed onto two floppies.





Then came Windows 95 and Macromedia Director's Shockwave, and I couldn't wait to animate the whole show and distribute it on CD. Just one problem: That whole multimedia era was over before it had a chance to develop. What killed it was the appearance of Flash and JavaScript on the internet. Suddenly, the idea of mailing our customers a static price list, whether on paper or recorded on a CD, didn't make sense anymore. Buyers rightfully expected any dynamic content to come from the web.

Having spent more than a year writing "How to Get it Printed," I'm not giving up on publishing a Flash or Silverlight version of it some day. But the price part of it, that's DOA. What you'll see instead is a web app that will let your customers access your site and work up a custom quote 24/7. And that quote won't be coming off a static database a la VistaPrint, but will be a real Morning Flight pricing engine quote using your own press rates and paper prices.

That's our next big project. Haven't decided yet whether to code it for Flash or Silverlight, but the back end will likely be MySQL, an open source database that's available at no charge from just about any ISP. It's mind boggling what can be done these days, given enough hours in the day and days in the week. For example, take a look at this app written in Silverlight:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/vertigo/FamilyShowOverview-broadband.wmv

Getting back to the price list, as long as you're still tweaking your prices, putting them in print is probably premature. Even after you've stabilized them, you'll still have to deal with the static issue, but at that point you could consider gathering all the orders this customer has placed, in say a three-month period, then feed that into Excel and update it periodically.

I know, Morning Flight Live can't come soon enough!

Hal