The first thing you will notice about the new system is the fantastic new interface.  With a brand new icon set designed specially for us by the DevCom Corporation and a really powerful menu structure, it’s really easy to find your way around.  The whole interface has an up-to-the minute look and feel, and supporting the whole structure is the SQL server database.   Constructing a new job is entirely wizard-based to eliminate possible sources of error.  All text entry can make use of user-defined ‘snippets’ – short context-sensitive sections of text which can be pasted in with a couple of keystrokes to save repetitive typing.

This is the initial menu:

As you can see everything grows from this single menu.

Jobs Management gives you everything to do with jobs and estimates – finding old ones and creating new ones, and calculating, quoting, confirming, and invoicing.

Reports consist of lists of jobs and invoices, profit accruals, added value reports and more.

Customers is everything to do with your customers – creating them, configuring them, seeing how much business they do with you, recording contacts, and setting up reminders to ring them.

Resource Management lets you set up your presses and put in your standard prices for other tasks.  These are the figures the system needs to know when calculating the most cost-effective way to produce a job.

And finally System Maintenance lets you configure everything else in the system so it works the way you do.

When you first go into the system, whichever you pick you will initially see the home page.

The home page you see at start-up shows a useful list of customers to be contacted today, and a list of jobs to be delivered in the next 7 days.  You can decide not to see this every day but many people find it useful.

The icons at the bottom right hand side are also useful.   There’s a ‘customer present’ feature, which hides or reveals profit markups and credit warnings, and theres access to the “Driver’s Seat” – a dashboard containing performance indicators.

Here you can see the main Printpak desktop.  At first sight it may seem daunting, but once you understand it you’ll wonder how you ever did without it!  So let’s take a detailed look.   This is the sort of screen you would see if you were to click on Jobs Management.  As you can see, that start-up menu has moved to the bottom left hand side).  At the top of the left hand column you can select what kind of jobs and estimates you want to see.  In this case you have clicked on ‘live jobs’, and you now have a list of those jobs in the centre column, with the top one selected.  The detailed ‘preview’ of that selected job is on the right hand side. 

This centre column is scrollable left and right to reveal other useful data about each job, and the little slider beneath the scroll bar allows you to control how much or little data is shown.

Half way down the left hand column, in blue, are links to job or estimate related activities, including ‘wizards’ to guide you through building a quote.

Lastly at the top right hand side are three ‘layout’ icons which allow you to rearrange the screen, and a magnifying glass which launches a search function, so you can always find that elusive job for Mr Povey that was done around last August (or was it the previous year?) – you know, the one with the cartoon logo?

If you double-click a job in the centre column it will take you to the Jobs Desktop.

If you select one or more ‘live’ jobs you can even schedule them!

There is even a built-in form designer for constructing your own Estimates, Invoices etc.