Shop Management

[Frog]

Well?

[tonypep]

OK Frog I'll play. We're old school but pretty effificient. Magnet boards and three part work orders.
I occaisionally do overflow for T-Formation. When they came to visit we spent some time reviewing their scheduling system which is Shopworks. I've used it before but man they took it to a seriously awesome new level. Really impressive.
tp

[Fresh Baked Printing]

Excel.

[alan802]

We have Shopworks and don't use it to it's full potential.  We also are old school in that some sales staff handwrites the work orders instead of just entering the info directly into Shopworks.  I have a copy of the work order for every single screen print job on my desk organized by the date they are due so I know exactly what our production schedule looks like.  If that stack is light and only has 15 sheets of paper, I know we aren't that busy, and when that stack is 40 sheets deep, we are running full out on turnaround times and I'll have to be outside in the shop getting my hands dirty.  I think we'd be fine on the screen printing side with little to no technology to help us stay organized, but the embroidery side is not ran near as efficiently and they aren't as organized as we are over here.

[ebscreen]

Mockup approved/deposited gets printed goes to "order blanks" stack.

Ordered blanks stack goes to "needs screens" stack.

Needs screens stack goes to "receiving" then "production" then
"shipping" then "invoicing.


One work order the whole way through.


Quickbooks for invoicing.


Currently working on a database to take the paper out of the equation
and to automate things I habitually mess up like ordering blanks and
whatnot.


Right now I use it for estimating and it's freaking awesome for that.
Screenshots of the backend and what the client is emailed in a PDF is
attached.

[Big Frank Sports]

We use Price-It Master and made more money than ever before for some reason.

Frank

[Homer]

T-quoter. invoicing built right in. we had our own system, but we would have to retype everything into QB to make an invoice, and that got old fast. T-quoter has a bunch of flaws though, I just didn't like the looks of price-it, don't care about price, like Frank -we make more money with it that without. Quoting is so much faster, saving us face time.

[tpitman]

Excel. Pretty much just bookkeeping. Cobbled up a workbook with a Schedule C form and sheets for every entry that feed into it so I can list expenses by category and just copy them into TurboTax at the end of the year. A second workbook keeps track of sales by month with a breakout of sales tax and additional discretionary sales tax by quarter with a total for the year, less taxes collected, that I copy onto the appropriate line of the Schedule C Workbook/Gross Sales. The appropriate line at the bottom shows taxable income at any time of the year. Takes no time at all.

[ZooCity]

We put everything into the "cloud" recently, almost no paper anymore with the exception of shipping slips.  

I've piggybacked a workflow/tracking system that allows me to check off each step of the order as done and sort by job into our web-based accounting system.  We use Saasu for all of the above, our POS (also web-based with a light software component), payroll (to a degree, the company is aussie so they don't have it totally hooked up for us yanks yet), very light CRM (my least favorite part of the system), tasking out jobs to each other, budgets, damn near everything really and it's been neato so far.  Nowhere near as powerful as QB for reporting and items but does quite a lot and does it well.  It's really up to the user to customize it out and follow their own procedures correctly or it all falls apart unlike QB or other management programs which are more rigid in how you enter things.  It costs $25/month for the accounting file and $25 for the POS which journals into the accounting.  

With the above deal, any of us from any computer with web access, and now even our phones which are basically pocket computers anymore, can generate quotes, enter sales leads, pull up a job, see if it's just a quote or a production invoice, see if they've paid and how much, if blanks need ordered, what the in-hand date it, etc.  We can accept payments this way as well since the whole workflow deal is actually using the functionality of the accounting system.  You can set permissions as well to keep co-workers from messing up the heavy accounting stuff.  

So far I'm a fan and I think it's "the way of the future".  The next step is getting the scrill together to get this and a few other cloud systems integrated into a cloud platform that we log into and uses api and coding to tie all the different functions into one interface.  

[Evo]

Quickbooks for now. I am basically a one man show so I've made it work.

I have the item list set up in a way that makes quoting pretty quick and easy. I bought the Ryonet QB add on and for the most part what was in there was unusable except the Excel pricing calculator, which I tweaked a bit to make it work for me.

For QB I have non-inventory items set up for things like print location and colors, with easy to remember codes to type in so there is much less typing involved overall. Print location/colors, shirt color then shirt style/size.

So for a estimate for let's say a 1 color print on the front of 100 Gildan black shirts it would look like the attached. Everything punches in very quick. Only thing that takes any more time is punching a few numbers into the Excel calculator once I glance at the current blanks pricing for that week.

Then I just print to PDFCreator and email it out.

Works for now.

I downloaded a free copy of Fastmanager but I've had no real time to eff with it.

[ZooCity]

here's what our invoices look like.  This is an actual with the contact info changed of course.   You can save/email them in one step out of the program and preview in the email box before sending which is nice.  I use the shipping slips in the print shop to check shirts in/out and include them in the box because they're way cleaner looking and easier to read without all the pricing in there.   I used to invoice out of excel which was laborious by comparison but I thought it looked a lot nicer.

We can make the Saasu invoices look any way we want but I'm just not that great with css.  I did manage to build a proper template and do some very primitive formatting the product of which is what yer seeing here.  I think it's totally rad that the invoices are simply run off code but wish I was skilled that way so I could take full advantage.  There's no design interface to help you along or anything, just straight code, some merge fields and a preview ability.   What I do find ingenious though is that you can build the template and then have multiple options when you click on "print" or "email"  pdf out of the sale itself.  Right now I have invoice and shipping slip setup but I could make one just for internal use, one just for quotes, etc.  Again, no skills so I need to wait on that and find somebody with 'em.   

It's cool to see what everyone elses invoices look like so far, keep 'em coming.

[Catnhat]

We have T-Quoter, but don't use it for near what it's capable of doing.  And haven't paid for the support thing when they changed it all up so not sure if we're gonna stick with it or go to something else.
The owners are somewhat of "technophobes" so anything dealing with computers/software is always a struggle.  Cloud computing scares the crap out of them for some reason, but they know it's coming and they'll have to get on board.

But gotta give the guy credit, he's been doing it for so long he can grab the 10 key and a legal pad and pop out a quote as fast as I can fill in the blanks in T-Quoter and get one and the totals will be the same.

Pisses me off!

[squeegee]

We use QB for all order entry, invoicing, PO's, estimates, etc.  It took a while but we have most every item we sell inputted.  I like QB because it gives you all the reports/analysis and our accountant of course likes QB too.

Our invoices look like Evo's in many ways.  We use a customized excel ss for quoting.

Scheduling we use Intuit's Company Scheduler which is like a calender, but we came up with a systematic method that let's us track most stages of every job.  It's web/flash based so everyone can see it at the nearest computer, and it self-refreshing so changes are seen pretty much in real time.  It's free with our version of QB.

[inkbrigade]

We use fast manager. We looked at all the systems out there aimed at screen printing and it's the one that sucked the least

It has some quirks but overall we really like it.

[GraphicDisorder]

Using Fast Manager here as well.

It's not perfect but its pretty good for us considering we were doing Excel before that.