Any other sites like this one? For the printing industry?

[sauce]

This is a great site for prepress, I was hoping to find a more general forum for printshops.

I work in a great little shop in NYC. I consider myself a "prepress monkey" (thats a new term I learned tonight) but I handle a lot of other stuff. We do 1-2 offset, digital full color, digital black/white, many types of bindery and we have very good relationships with vendors who do our 4/color, thermography, screen, etc, so we basically handle everything.

One major thorn in my side lately has been our pricing methods. Right now we still use the old Bill Friday printing book. I've tried every printshop pricing software out there but none of them worked for me because none of htem come with a pre-made database. They all want me to fill in the prices myself. But how do I know what I should be charging people? I wish Bill Friday was still around to make a nice database for EFI's PrintSmith, that would be ideal.

[seetomtype]

Welcome to the Forum.

Print pricing is way to regional to have a silver bullet price sheet, IMO.
We price everything as a per job quote. Part of the reason for that is
the constantly changing price of paper, at least here. We can't seem
to get a good solution from our paper vendors for electronic updates
to existing data bases so prices are accurately modified. Maybe we don't
buy enough paper to get the red carpet treatment. If you find the Holy
Grail of print pricing software, post back because my company is interested.

I can't think of a better place to get offset printing info than here, btw.

[abc]

You should also have a look at Printplanet.com

they have a variety of forums for different aspects of the industry.

I've been on that and this forum for a long time and got good stuff from both

[David]

I agree with ABC. I've been with Printplanet.com and Dave's Forums for some time now as do some of my co-workers who do things other than Prepress.
They have a wide spectrum of forums that tap into almost all of the printing areas.

my .02,
David

[Peon]

We use the Avanti system for our pre-billing (planning/estimating) and it works very well. It is a bit pricey but it's something to take a look at.