ImposeIQ MIS guide

Overview

The management system the rest of the suite feeds. An MIS — Management Information System — is what a commercial shop runs its jobs on: the estimate that won the work, the job ticket the floor works to, what each operation really cost, and the invoice that closes it. This one is built around the thing most print MIS packages cannot do — the floor reporting for itself. A DC-618 that finishes a job says so, and the board moves.

Cost centers, stock & routings

Nothing can be priced until the shop exists in the software, so a new install comes up as a plausible small commercial printer in Texas: fourteen customers (retail, trade, broker and house pricing, a franchise shop, a dealer partner, a school-district in-plant, two Storefront customers and one prospect) and thirty jobs that between them come in by every route the MIS takes — typed in, converted from a quote, a Storefront web order (paid by card, or on a PO), a JDF ticket from a dealer's MIS by hot folder or JMF (one waiting for review, one released, one released over a finishing-check block, one rejected), and an Automation Workflows hot folder. Their artwork carries preflight results from Preflight PRO, callas pdfToolbox and PitStop (passed, failed, and fixed); most are imposed, one is blocked by the finishing check, and several are routed to a POLAR N 115, one of them cut from a saved cutter program. Invoices are there in every state — out, overdue, part paid and paid — plus a toner press, a B2 inkjet, a 20 × 26 offset, three guillotines, the Duplo finishing line this suite already knows about, a booklet line and a perfect binder — with paper at real-ish money. Every one of those numbers is a starting point, not a claim about your shop. Replace them in Cost centers & setup before you quote anything real.

A cost center is a machine or a bench with a burdened hourly rate, a run rate, and a setup time. The run rate is counted in whatever that center actually measures:

A routing is a list of cost centers a job walks through in order — "digital business cards", "saddle-stitched booklet", "spot UV + foil cover". Picking one on an estimate drops the whole operation list in already ordered.

Estimating

The estimator prices the way an estimator does, and shows its working:

• The imposition — how many up the piece runs on the press sheet, worked out with the same geometry the Imposer uses, both ways round, best yield kept. An estimate built on 8-up that imposes 6-up is how a shop loses money without ever finding out where.
• The paper — net sheets, plus makeready sheets burned getting to color, plus running spoilage. All three are real stock the job pays for.
• The time — setup and run for every operation, at that center's own rate and basis, with minimum charges applied where they bite.
• The money — cost, markup, sell, margin, unit price and price per thousand. Markup and margin are both shown, because confusing the two is a classic way to quote a job at a loss.
• Quantity breaks — the same job at 250 / 500 / 1,000, each one a full estimate, because the answer is never linear: setup spreads over more pieces and the unit price falls in a curve.

Outside services — a cutting die, trade foiling — are entered separately and marked up on their own, so the shop's press markup is not applied to something a trade house made.

Laid out for the finisher. When an estimate's operations include a Duplo DC (DC-618, DC-648 or DC-746), the imposition is the best one that DC can actually slit and cut, not just the best paper yield. Each column gutter uses two slitters, and the DC-618 has six, so 25-up business cards turned (five across) are out. A slit gutter must be 0 or 5–15 mm, so a 1/8″ gutter between columns is widened to 1/4″, and the cut gutter between rows is left as you set it. On 13 × 19 this gives the usual 24-up (3 × 8). How it runs shows which machine the layout was made for, and when it gave up yield it shows the best-yield layout and the reason. The paper, the press time and the job's finishing check all use this layout.

Will the sheet run? The press sheet is checked against every machine on the estimate. Presses are checked against their press-library limits; a press with no library record is read from its name, so "(SRA3)" means 13 × 19.2. Finishers are checked against their feeders, such as the DC-618's 330.5 mm across and the DFL-700's 385 × 660 mm. When the sheet does not fit, a red This sheet will not run card says which machines refuse it. It also offers the cut of the stock that goes through all of them, for example 12.5 × 19, 2 out of each 19 × 25, with one click to use it. A press sheet cut from a bigger stock sheet is costed and stocked in stock sheets. When the press operator books 40 sheets used, 20 stock sheets come off the shelf.

Custom dies: steel rule (DSM-1000) & flexible (UD-320)

A new die layout means a new die from a die maker, and the die is often the longest lead time on the job. There are two kinds, and the kind is a field on the die:

• Steel-rule die for the DSM-1000 platen die cutter. It takes one die-board size whatever the sheet: 20.47 × 32.28 in (B2).
• Flexible (magnetic) die for the UD-320 rotary die cutter. A thin etched plate that wraps the magnetic cylinder.

Add one with Add a steel-rule die (DSM-1000) or Add a flexible die (UD-320) on the estimate, or on a job's Routing & time tab. You can switch the kind on the die afterwards. Each kind has its own budget tiers, turnaround and rush in Setup.

• What it is — the kind, new die or a die already on the shelf, a budget tier, number up, the operations on the die (cut, crease, perf, kiss-cut), the substrate, the rule height (steel rule only) and the die maker.
• What it costs — the tier's budget, or the die maker's own figure when you have one. The tiers are budget allowances, not supplier quotes. Steel rule, from Duplo's DSM-1000 steel-rule die overview: Simple layout $250–$500, Typical B2 DSM-1000 job about $500 (the default), and Complex or heavily populated layout $800–$1,500+. Flexible dies run about $250 up to close to $2,000, with a median and average around $550: Simple layout $250–$450, Typical UD-320 job about $550 (the default), and Complex or heavily populated layout $650–$2,000. The die maker sizes a flexible plate from the cut-line area, and plate size drives the price. The real price depends on the layout (rule length or etched area, number up, detail), the operations and the substrate. Ask the die maker to itemize the die, any ejection rubber or creasing accessories, freight and rush.
• How it is charged — passed through at cost (the default) or with its own markup, set per kind. It is an outside line, so the shop's press markup is never applied to it. Reusing a die costs nothing and waits for nothing.
• Turnaround — the die maker's working days, editable per die. Steel rule defaults to 5 (rush 2); the overview gives no figure, so set it from your die maker. Flexible defaults to 5 (rush 2), because a die usually takes 4–5 production days. Rush uses the rush lead time and adds the rush surcharge (default +50%) to a budget figure. Neither source gives a rush figure, so those are guesses to edit.

Die and artwork checklist. The estimate and the job card show a checklist for the kind of die. For a flexible die on the UD-320 it comes from the UD-310 product guide and Operation Manual:

• Sheet 8.27 × 11.69 in to 15.35 × 20.47 in (210 × 297 to 390 × 520 mm), 106–400 gsm; 200 gsm minimum to use the separator. The largest workable cut area is 14.33 × 20.275 in (364 × 515 mm).
• First cut at least 10 mm from the lead edge, because that cut feeds the sheet (12–15 mm on thin paper). 15 mm margins top and bottom, gutters at least 10 mm horizontal and 6 mm vertical. Turn each piece 1° on its own when it has straight cuts across the feed.
• Register marks. Y mark: 3 mm wide, 100 mm long, centred on the sheet width, 5 mm from the edge. X mark (when reading X and Y): 3 mm wide, 25 mm or longer, 100 mm from the sheet centre face up (76 mm face down), 5 mm from the edge.
• Dieline colours for the die maker: cut red, score green, kiss cut blue. Creases are a three-knife score.
• A flexible die lasts about 100,000–200,000 impressions, depending on the die lines and stock. The Dies list counts it against 100,000.

The estimate shows the die line, the date the die would arrive if the quote were approved today, and the earliest delivery: the die's turnaround plus the working days from die to delivery (default 2). The quote PDF says Delivery: N working days from approval. Working days follow the shop's work calendar, so weekends and shop holidays are skipped.

On the job. The die card follows the order: To order → Ordered → Received → In use. Mark ordered records the order date and PO, and the die is due that many working days later. Until the die is received the die-cutting step (the DSM-1000 step for a steel-rule die, the UD-320 step for a flexible one) is held. The schedule will not plan it before the die arrives and shows a Die tag on it, and the floor cannot start it. The card warns when the die lands after the press run. When it lands after the job's due date, the job shows At risk. A die not ordered yet is counted from today, so the hold moves later every day nobody orders it. Mark received puts the die on the shelf in Dies, numbered, against the customer, at what it cost, as a steel-rule or flexible die. A repeat job can then pick Reuse a die on the shelf. Only dies of the same kind are offered, and the customer's own are listed first and marked ★.

Setup → Custom cutting dies has a block for each kind. Each block holds the tiers (label, low, high, budget, open-ended, which one is the default), the turnaround, rush turnaround and surcharge, the days from die to delivery, and whether those dies are passed through at cost or marked up. Dies and settings saved before there were kinds count as steel rule.

Quotes and turning one into a job

Save an estimate and it becomes a numbered quote with a validity date; a quote past that date reads as expired without anybody running a nightly job. Accept → create job turns it into a real job in one step, carrying the priced routing across with the estimated setup, run time and cost frozen onto each operation. That frozen number is what the floor's real time is measured against later — recomputing it from today's rates would quietly erase the variance the shop is trying to see.

The job ticket

Every job carries its specification, its routing, its materials, its shipments and a full history. The history is written by the software on every path, not by whichever screen made the change — so when a job ships two days late, the shop can see exactly where the two days went.

A job's status mostly looks after itself. Start the first operation and it is in production; close the last one and it is finished; ship the whole quantity and it is shipped; invoice it and it is invoiced. On hold and cancelled are the two an operator sets on purpose, so they stick — deriving those would fight the person who set them.

Board, schedule and what is late

The production board is the job lifecycle left to right, cards sorted by priority and then by due date, late ones flagged. Drag a card to move it by hand; anything the floor reports moves it on its own.

The schedule plans every open job backward from its due date. The last operation lands on the due date, or the latest working day that still has room on that machine. Each earlier operation lands a set number of working days before the next one (Days between steps, 1 by default). A full day pushes work earlier, and a long operation can be split across days. Work that cannot fit before today goes on today, and the job is marked At risk: it will not make its date as planned. Operations already running are always on today. That is how a shop sees on Tuesday that Thursday is already over-booked, instead of finding out on Thursday.

Each job's Routing & time tab shows the planned day for every operation.

Work calendar

In Cost centers & setup → Work calendar you set how jobs are scheduled (Plan backward from the due date, or Put all work on the due date for the old behaviour), the days between steps, and the shop's working days. Below that, add holidays, overtime and downtime. Pick a date and either the whole shop or one machine, then the hours available that day: 0 for closed, or for example 4 for a Saturday of overtime. Add US holidays adds New Year's, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thanksgiving (and the day after) and Christmas, moved to the nearest weekday when they fall on a weekend.

Each cost center keeps its own capacity hours per day, and can have its own working days (untick Same as the shop calendar), for example a press that also runs Saturdays. On the Schedule, days a machine does not work are shaded, and the load % is measured against that day's hours.

Pick 1 day or 7 / 14 / 21 / 30 days at the top. Use ‹ / ›, Today or the date box to move around, and the department list to show one department. In the multi-day grid, click a day heading or any cell to open that day.

The 1-day view shows one lane per machine: a shift bar with each job as a block in run order (the dashed red line is the end of the shift; striped blocks run past it), then a card for every operation. On a card you can Start, Pause and Finish the operation, open the job, or move the job's due date one working day with ← Due / Due →. You can also drag a card onto a day in the week strip at the top to make that day the due date. The whole job then re-plans around the new date. Undo move puts the last one back.

Run order. The number on each card is the order that machine runs its waiting work in. Drag a card up or down within its machine, or use ▲ / ▼, to change it. Cards set by hand show a filled number. Work already running (▶) always stays first. The shop-floor queue follows the same order.

Move to another machine. Drag a card onto another machine's lane, or use Move to machine… on the card. Work can only move between machines in the same department, for example DC-648 to DC-618 or HC-550i to HC-680i, and not while it is running. Set-up time becomes the new machine's, and run time is adjusted for the speed difference. The job's quoted cost stays as it was sold. The move is recorded in the job's History.

At risk. The Dashboard shows an At risk count and list: jobs the schedule says will miss their due date but are not late yet. An alert, Job at risk of being late, is sent once per job (Telegram, email or whatever you have set up in Settings → Notifications). It is sent again only if the job gets back on track and then slips again, or its due date changes.

Floor performance: machines, estimates and Duplo ROI

At the top of Reports, pick a period (last 30, 90, 180 or 365 days). Three reports read the time your floor booked on operations finished in that period. Each one exports to PDF.

Machine performance shows, for each machine, hours planned vs hours run and how that compares with the estimate (over 100% means faster than quoted). It also shows make-ready vs running time, utilization (hours run against the hours the work calendar says the machine was available), waste %, real speed against rated speed, and how much of the time came straight from the machine (JMF) rather than being keyed in.

Estimate vs actual by machine tells you where your rates are off. Once a machine has at least 3 finished operations and is 10% or more away from its rated speed or set-up, it suggests the real numbers, for example "Runs 22% faster than your estimate." Apply writes them to the cost center, so new estimates use them. Jobs already sold keep the numbers they were quoted on. Setup must be unlocked to apply.

Duplo automation ROI compares the time your Duplo machines actually took with the same pieces done by hand. For each machine you can set the manual process it replaces, minutes per 1,000 finished pieces (books, for binders), manual set-up per job, and how many people it takes. Enter the shop's loaded labor rate and, if you like, what the machine cost, and it shows hours and dollars saved, a yearly figure at the current pace, and payback. The starting minutes are estimates, so set them to what the shop really did before. The PDF prints every assumption it used. It counts labor only: less waste, work brought in-house and new work won are on top of it.

Press library: adding and removing your presses

Cost centers & setup → Press library lists 68 production presses from Canon, Ricoh, Sharp, Konica Minolta, HP, Xerox, Fujifilm and Kyocera: color and mono toner, HP Indigo, sheetfed and UV inkjet, and roll-fed inkjet. Filter by maker or technology, or search. Add to shop makes the press a cost center. The window shows its speed as press sheets per hour, one-sided and two-sided, plus a starting burdened rate, set-up, makeready sheets and click cost. Change any of them, then save. Add your own model covers a press that is not listed. To take a press out, use Remove on the cost center list. If it is still on an open job, you are offered Deactivate instead.

What the MIS does with it:

• Speed. Makers quote Letter/A4 pages per minute, B2 sheets per hour, or metres per minute. The library turns each into press sheets per hour on the press's own sheet. Letter/A4 ppm runs two-up on a 13 × 19 class sheet, so the sheet rate is half the page rate (the maker's SRA3 figure is used when published). Two-sided work runs at half speed, except on presses that print both sides in one pass. Figures marked ≈ were worked out rather than published, so check them against your own press.
• Two-sided jobs are estimated at the press's two-sided speed and charged two clicks per sheet.
• Sheet size. An estimate warns when the press sheet is bigger than the press takes, or needs its long-sheet option.
• Roll-fed presses are rated in Letter/A4 pages. Estimate them with an 8.5 × 11 sheet.
• The Schedule, machine performance and estimate-vs-actual reports use the press like any other cost center.
• In the Imposer, each press in the shop appears in the sheet-size list (🖨) at its maximum sheet.

Export to QuickBooks

Invoices → Export to QuickBooks writes a file QuickBooks can import. Pick a format and a date range:

• QuickBooks Online: invoices (CSV). In QuickBooks Online go to Settings → Import data → Invoices and choose the file. It has one row per invoice line, with dates as MM/DD/YYYY. You can import up to 100 invoices at a time. Intuit does not allow this import when sales tax is switched on in the company; the window warns you when that applies.
• QuickBooks Desktop: customers, invoices & payments (IIF). In QuickBooks Desktop go to File → Utilities → Import → IIF Files (back up the company file first). New customers are added. Payments arrive un-applied, so apply each one to the invoice named in its memo.
• Payments received (CSV). A plain list for your records or a bookkeeper. QuickBooks Online cannot import payments from a file on its own.

By default only invoices and payments not exported before are included. Once the file is saved they are marked, and a small QB tag appears next to the invoice number. Draft, void and sample invoices are never exported. Under QuickBooks item and account names, enter your product/service item, income, receivable, deposit and sales-tax names exactly as they appear in QuickBooks. They are remembered for next time.

Customer status link

On a job's Job ticket tab, Share a status link publishes a page the customer can open any time. It shows where the job is (Order received, Proof, In production, Finished, Shipped), the production steps with the one on the machine now, the due date, and shipments with tracking links. It shows no prices, costs or internal notes. Copy, Open or Email to customer the link. The page updates by itself a few seconds after anything changes on the job. Stop sharing takes it down, after which the link says it is no longer active.

The page is served from your published Storefront site on Netlify, using the same collection key as online orders, so nothing on this PC is opened to the internet. Publish the storefront once after updating ImposeIQ to add status pages to it. If an update cannot reach the site, the job shows Last update failed and it retries on the next sweep.

Online proof & approval

On a job's Job ticket tab, the Online proof card sends the customer a link to a soft proof. Click Send a proof…, tick the artwork files to show (PDF pages, JPEG or PNG, up to 80 pages; Add another file… for a proof that is not attached to the job), check who it goes to and the message, then Publish proof. ImposeIQ renders each page on this PC, puts it on your Storefront site and marks the job Proof out. Tick Email the link from the website to send it through the storefront's Resend or SendGrid email; if the site has no email set up, your mail app opens instead.

The customer sees every page with a dashed trim line (bleed shaded), can zoom, and clicks anywhere on a page to pin a numbered comment. They type their name as a signature and choose Approve, Approve with the small changes I noted (you can switch this choice off) or Make changes and send me a new proof. Approving needs a tick confirming they checked spelling, wording, numbers, size and layout. Each version can be answered once; the shop gets an email, and the customer gets a copy if they gave an address.

ImposeIQ collects the answer every two minutes (or click Check for an answer):

• Approved ticks Proof approved by the customer with their name, moves the job to Ready and raises the Proof approved notification.
• Approved with changes does the same and adds a note to the job that the changes must be made before it runs.
• Changes requested moves the job back to Prepress and raises Proof changes requested. Fix the art and click Send new version…; the same link shows v2 and the customer can still look at v1.

Every answer is filed in the job's artwork folder under Proofs as an approval record PDF: who answered, when, from what internet address and browser, what they ticked, their notes, and each page with their pins drawn on it. Approval record (PDF) opens it. The pictures the customer saw are kept in the same folder.

When the job also has a customer status link, the status page shows a Review and approve the proof button while a proof is waiting, and the proof page links back to the status page. Withdraw link takes the proof down; the versions and answers stay on the job. Like status pages, proofs are served from your Storefront site with its collection key — publish the storefront once after updating ImposeIQ to add proof pages to it. Shops that still approve by phone or in person can keep using the manual Proof checkboxes.

Use a phone as the barcode scanner

No USB scanner at the machine? On Shop floor, click 📱 Phone scanner, then Turn on phone scanner. Point the phone's camera at the QR code shown and tap the link. The ImposeIQ Scanner page opens on the phone.

• Tap Scan barcode and take a photo of the barcode on the job ticket or press sheet. The page reads it and sends it to the PC. Get close enough that the barcode fills most of the photo, and avoid glare. You can also type a job number and tap Send.
• On the PC, a phone scan works like a USB scanner. On Shop floor it looks the job up. If a text box has the cursor, it types the code there. Anywhere else, it opens the job.
• The phone shows each job it scanned: number, title, customer and where it is. Prices and contacts are never sent to it, and it cannot change anything.
• It reads the MIS job barcode (Code 39) and Code 128 on any phone. Android phones also read QR and other codes.
• The phone must be on the same network as the PC. The first time, Windows may ask to allow ImposeIQ on private networks; allow it. The phone stays paired even after a restart. New pairing code unpairs every phone, and Turn off stops it.
• A live viewfinder, which scans continuously without taking photos, needs a secure (https) page. On the shop network the page uses the photo method instead. If the PC is reached over Tailscale with https, the live camera is used automatically.

The shop-floor station

Sized for somebody standing at a machine with a scanner: big type, big buttons, one input with the cursor already in it. Scan the job barcode off the sheet and the job comes up with its operations; Start, Pause and Finish book real time against the operation, and Finish asks for the good count, the waste and the sheets used.

That is the station on the shop PC itself. To put the same job of work on a tablet at the machine — its own queue, its own operator, and no pricing anywhere on it — see Accounts, terminals & who sees what below.

Accounts, terminals & who sees what

Everything above assumes one PC in the office. A shop with a prepress operator and people on the floor wants more screens than that — and the moment a second screen can change a job, the question stops being "what does this screen show" and becomes "what is this person allowed to do".

Two things on this screen sound alike and are not. Getting them the wrong way round is the single easiest mistake to make here, so they are named differently everywhere in the app:

Three kinds of screen, and they are deliberately different things:

What each kind of account can do

Five kinds, and a shop can hand one person an extra power without inventing a sixth.

Two smaller controls sit alongside the five:

• An extra power for one person — the prepress operator who also does the buying gets purchasing added to their account rather than being promoted to something they should not be.
• Something taken away — and taking away always wins, including over the role. A permission somebody is arguing about is a permission they should not have.

Putting a screen on the shop floor

Five minutes, once per screen. Everything is on Cost centers & setup → Accounts & terminals.

The operator's phone

A terminal stays at one machine. An operator's phone goes with the operator. They pick the machine they are at (or scan the job ticket), see that queue, and start, pause, finish or flag the work. A second tab, Workflows, shows what the Workflows engine is running, what failed, and any approval step waiting for somebody, so the proof check at the press can be answered at the press.

1. Turn on Shop floor access (Cost centers & setup → Accounts & terminals). Shop Wi-Fi works on the floor. Behind tailscale serve also works off-site and gives the phone a live camera viewfinder.
2. Under Shop floor terminals, click Add a phone and name it after whose phone it is.
3. A pairing QR code appears. Point the phone's camera at it and tap the link. The phone pairs itself, and the operator taps their PIN. Use Share → Add to Home Screen to make it an app icon.

Jobs tab: the chips across the top pick the department, then the machine. The phone starts on the operator's own department. Tap a job to see its steps. The likely step is already picked, and the operator can tap another. Start, Pause, Finished (good and waste counts) and Problem work the same way as on a terminal. Work is booked to whoever signed in on the phone.

Scan tab: scans the barcode on the job ticket and opens that job. Over plain http the phone takes a photo and reads the barcode out of it. Over Tailscale https it opens a live viewfinder.

Workflows tab: approvals show the instructions and the held files. Tap a PDF or image to look at it, then Approve (the workflow carries on) or Reject (a reason is required, and it is passed to the workflow's reject action). The decision is logged as "Name (phone)". Operators and prepress can approve, and estimators can only watch. To stop one person approving, deny workflow:approve on their account.

Operators, the number they tap in, and badges

An operator is not an account. They have no password, they cannot sign in to anything else, and they exist for one reason: so the twelve minutes that just went onto a job have a name on them.

At the terminal they tap a four-digit number, or scan their badge if the shop has a wedge scanner — the screen takes either without being told which is coming. It is tried on every digit from the fourth, so a four-digit number needs no Enter key and a longer one still works.

• The obvious numbers are refused — 1234, 4321, 0000, and anything counting up or down. Between a third and a half of all PINs ever chosen are in that handful.
• Nobody is still signed in the next morning. An operator is cleared after about ten hours, so the first job of the day is never booked to whoever closed up last night.
• Removing an operator keeps their work. The hours already booked stay on the jobs they went onto.

Shop floor access and the remote board are two different things

Both put the MIS on another screen, and they are not interchangeable.

Turning one on does not turn the other on, and turning one off does not turn the other off.

Everything the MIS itself already promised still holds. The shop data is still written by this one PC and nothing else, which is what keeps it intact — a terminal asks this PC to do something, it never touches the file. Accounts live in their own file beside the MIS data rather than inside it, so no password, number or key can travel out in a backup. And nothing here can be changed while Cost centers & setup is locked, because deciding who can get into the shop is the same size of decision as changing the rates.

When the floor cannot reach the MIS

The terminal has a coloured dot next to the operator's name, and it is the first thing to look at.

• Nothing is lost when the wifi drops. Each start and finish is queued with a ticket of its own before it is sent, and that ticket is reused on every retry — so however many times the request eventually gets through, and however many times a frustrated operator taps the button, the job is started once and finished once.
• A refusal is not retried. If the shop PC answers and says no — the job moved, the step is already closed — the terminal stops and tells the operator, rather than quietly trying forever and leaving them thinking it worked.
• Check what the shop PC thinks under Signed in now: every terminal and office screen currently signed in, who is standing at each one, and when it was last heard from. Sign every terminal out is the button for a tablet that has gone missing — the office stays signed in.

CRM & sales — the pipeline

The CRM is part of the MIS, not a second program with its own address book. Every account in it is an MIS customer: a prospect a rep adds on the road is a customer record marked Prospect, and the day it buys it becomes a Customer without anyone re-typing it. Open it from MIS → CRM & sales.

• Quotes win deals by themselves. A quote drafted from the CRM is attached to its deal. When that quote is marked Accepted in Quotes & estimates, the deal moves to Won and the prospect becomes a customer.
• Who owns an account is the Sales rep on it. Set it in the account window or with Assign selected. A rep only ever sees the accounts assigned to them.
• Events for Rep drafted a quote, Deal won, New prospect added and Follow-up coming due are in Settings → Notifications under CRM — sales team.

CRM on a salesperson's phone

Reps use a phone app built for the road. It has five buttons along the bottom:

• Check in logs a visit with the phone's location. The first check-in at an account also pins where that account is, which is what makes Nearby and directions work from then on.
• No signal is fine. Everything a rep logs is kept on the phone and sent when it has signal again — the chip at the top right says how many changes are waiting. Each change carries its own ticket, so one sent twice is only saved once.
• When a rep taps Call and comes back to the app, it offers to log the call.
• A rep sees sell prices only — never cost or margin — and never another rep's accounts. That is enforced on the shop PC, not just hidden on the phone.

Pricing a job from the phone

Quote on the phone asks for what a rep can answer in a lobby: the kind of job (one of your routings), the paper, the finished size, the quantity, sides and pages, and optional extra quantities. Price it runs the MIS's own estimator and shows the price, the price each and per thousand, and the price at each extra quantity. Shop default paper picks the stock that gets the most pieces on a sheet.

Send to office creates a draft quote in Quotes & estimates, marked as drafted in the CRM, with the rep's notes, and opens a deal for it at the Quoted stage. Nothing with a price on it goes to the customer until the office checks it and sends it.

Setting reps' phones up

1. Give each rep an MIS account with the role Sales rep — Cost centers & setup → Access. Owners and estimators can use the CRM too, and see every rep.
2. Assign their accounts in CRM & sales → Accounts.
3. For reminders, add each rep to Settings → Notifications → People with the same name as their MIS account and a Telegram, ntfy or email address. They are told before a follow-up is due, and each morning get a list of anything overdue.
4. Choose how phones connect in CRM & sales → Phones & settings:

On either, open the page on the phone and use Share → Add to Home Screen so it opens like an app.

Connecting HubSpot, Salesforce & other CRMs

If the shop already runs its sales in a CRM, connect it in Cost centers & setup → CRM connections and the two stay in step, both ways. One CRM at a time — two CRMs syncing into the same customers would overwrite each other.

1. Pick the CRM, paste the keys, press Save & test connection. A green line names the CRM account it reached.
2. Look at Deal stages…: how each CRM stage reads in the MIS and the other way. The first guesses come from the stage names.
3. Tick Sync automatically, choose how often, and Save sync settings — or press Sync now.

• The first sync matches before it creates. Companies are matched by name ("Acme Printing, Inc." is "Acme Printing"), contacts by email, so connecting a CRM the shop has used for years does not double anything. Blank MIS fields are filled from the CRM.
• After that only changes move. A record changed on one side goes to the other. Changed on both since the last sync: When the same record was changed in both, keep decides — the newest edit (the default), always the CRM, or always the MIS.
• Nothing is deleted on either side, ever. Companies that come in from the CRM arrive as prospects.
• Work from before you connected is not posted as notes — only what happens from then on.
• The keys are stored encrypted on this PC and never shown again; the card only says saved. Disconnect removes them. Re-match records forgets the links, and the next sync matches by name and email again.
• If the sync stops — usually a key that expired or was revoked in the CRM — the card shows why, and the Outside CRM sync failed notification (Settings → Notifications, CRM — sales team) says so once.
• It runs while ImposeIQ is open on this PC.

Webhook — any other CRM or app

For Monday, Keap, Copper, Freshsales, Close or anything else, the webhook on the same card sends MIS changes as JSON to an address you give it — a Zapier "Catch Hook", a Make custom webhook, an n8n webhook node, or the app's own. It works on its own or beside a connected CRM. Tick which changes to send: customers added or changed, deals added, changed, won or lost, quotes sent, accepted or declined, jobs opened or shipped, invoices paid.

• Each POST carries event, occurredAt and the record in data, and an X-ImposeIQ-Signature header (an HMAC-SHA256 of the body with the signing secret, shown once when you save).
• Send a test posts a ping event so you can map fields in Zapier or Make.
• Also accept changes sent in lets the other system create or update companies and deals here, by POSTing to the MIS API at /api/v1/integrations/crm-webhook with the inbound key as a Bearer token. The MIS API answers only on your network or tailnet, so whatever sends in has to be there too.

Stock on a job

A job takes its stock from the estimate it is made from: the Stock picked in the Estimator becomes the job's first material line, with the planned sheets and the cost per sheet. You can change it on the job: open it, go to Costs, and use the Materials card.

• Add stock adds another paper, or a supply such as varnish or foil. The cost comes from the catalog, and you can change it.
• Change swaps a line's stock or re-plans its quantity. Once sheets have been booked against a line, its stock cannot change, because those sheets already came off the shelf. Add the new stock as another line instead.
• Use for press picks which line the press operator's sheets used count is booked against. That is the first line.
• Remove takes off a line that has not been used yet.

Changing the stock changes the job's planned material cost, which Estimate against actual uses. It does not change the job's price, because that was already quoted or paid.

Web orders. A storefront order says the paper in the customer's words, such as "16pt matte card stock". The MIS turns that into a catalog stock when the order comes in. First it uses the stock somebody chose the last time an order asked for that same paper. If there isn't one, it looks for a catalog stock whose weight or caliper and finish agree, and flags that match on the job so you can check it. "Matte card stock" with no weight is never guessed. When the size is known, the planned sheets are worked out from it. If nothing matches, the job shows a note on its Materials card. Pick the stock once, leave Use this stock for future web orders ticked, and every later order for that paper arrives with it. Any open web jobs already waiting for that paper get it at the same time.

Web sites and other systems that create jobs through the MIS API can do the same with POST /jobs/:id/materials and DELETE /jobs/:id/materials/:materialId.

Artwork on a job

Drop the customer's files straight onto the job's Artwork card, or click it to pick them. Either way the MIS takes its own copy into a folder named for the job (25-0413 Spring menu), so the customer can empty their Downloads folder and the job still has its art. Where the file came from is kept alongside it, for the day somebody asks which file was really used.

Attaching a file marks the job as having received artwork — it deliberately does not mark the proof as approved, because a file arriving is not a customer signing anything off. Open opens the file in whatever the machine uses for it, Show reveals it in its folder, and Remove takes it off the job and deletes the job's copy only — the customer's original is never touched. A file that has gone missing from this machine is marked rather than left as a button that does nothing.

Is the artwork big enough?

Check resolution on the job's Artwork card measures every attached image against the job's own trim size and target dpi — a business card and a poster need a very different pixel count from the same JPG, so the job's own placed size is what it is judged against rather than a flat "300 dpi or bust" rule. Each file comes back with its effective dpi, its pixel dimensions and one of Image Rescue's own five verdicts — see Image Rescue → The five answers.

A file that only needs re-tagging or resampling gets a button right there — Re-tag or Enlarge — that runs Image Rescue on it without leaving the job. The rescued file is attached to the job beside the original rather than over it, so a bad enlargement or a better file arriving later never costs you the file the customer actually sent.

A file too far gone to save is flagged rather than offered a button — the right move there is asking the customer for the original, not enlarging a JPG past the point it can help.

Machines reporting for themselves

This is the part worth having. JDF is the job; JMF is the conversation about it — and the JDF Bridge already speaks it. With Accept JMF status messages switched on, a finisher that reports the barcode it read off the sheet moves the matching job's operation without anybody scanning anything:

Every entry booked this way is marked Machine on the job's time list, so a supervisor can always tell what a machine said from what a person typed. A prepress automation workflow reports the same way and closes the prepress operation when it finishes.

Estimate against actual

The single most valuable number in an MIS, and the one most shops cannot produce: what the job was quoted at against what it really cost. Actual labor is the minutes the floor booked, priced at the cost center's own rate; actual material is the sheets somebody counted. Each job shows the variance per line and the realized margin against the quoted one, and the Reports view ranks every finished job by how far out its estimate was — which is how a shop finds out its 20-minute makeready is really 45.

Inventory, vendors & buying

The number the Inventory screen leads with is free, not on hand. A rack with 6,000 sheets and 5,500 already promised to a job in production has 500 sheets, and an estimator who reads 6,000 sells the same pallet twice. On hand, claimed, free, on order and the reorder point sit side by side so that never happens.

Nothing ever writes a stock level directly. Every change is a movement with a reason attached — received against a purchase order, used on a job, counted, returned — and the level is what the movements add up to. History on any stock line shows every one of them. A shop that cannot explain why the system says 4,200 when the rack holds 3,800 stops believing the system, and then stops using it.

Purchase orders cover both halves of what a shop buys: paper, which comes back as sheets on a rack, and outside work — foiling, die cutting, perfect binding — which comes back as a cost on a job and moves no stock at all. An order can be received in parts, because half a pallet turning up is normal, and what is still outstanding stays visible until it lands. Once an order has been sent to the vendor its lines are fixed: the vendor is working from the copy that was sent, and quietly editing this one would make the receiving figures meaningless.

Dies — steel-rule and flexible

The Dies screen under Materials keeps the cutting dies the shop owns: steel-rule dies for the DSM-1000 and flexible magnetic dies for the UD-320. A die is a tool, not stock — it is not used up, but it wears with every impression, it lives on a numbered shelf, and it goes missing the day the customer reorders.

Check out records who took the die and for which job; Check in adds the impressions it ran and the shelf it went back to, or sends it for repair. Record a run adds impressions without a check-out. Runs tied to a job also appear in that job's history. Every step — added, edited, out, in, run, repair, retired — is kept in the die's own history. Retire a die that is worn out or no longer needed rather than deleting it, so its history stays.

Gangs — several jobs on one press sheet

Short runs of the same stock and finishing cost more in setups than in paper. A gang prints several of them together on one sheet, the sheet goes through the cutter once, and the pieces are sorted back into their own jobs afterwards. Open Gangs under Work.

What can share a sheet

• The same stock and weight, sides, coating and finishing, and the same machines on the routing.
• A grid. A Duplo DC slits the whole sheet and cuts across it, so every gutter must line up. Jobs of different sizes gang only when they share a width or a height; the planner leaves out layouts that waste more than the setups save.
• Jobs that are creased, perforated or folded also need the same trim size, because a crease runs edge to edge.
• One run length for the whole sheet, so each job's overrun stays small — within 10% or 25 pieces of what was ordered. A 5,000 piece job and a 50 piece job do not gang.

Spot UV and foil usage

The estimate now counts the varnish and foil a job will really use, instead of a flat consumables guess. On the estimator, the Spot UV & foil card takes the percent of each side that is coated; the varnish and foil show up as material lines, priced from your supplies, and a card on the right shows the amounts, the cost per sheet and the cost for the whole job.

When a job is made from the quote, the varnish and foil are added to the job's materials in the units the shelf counts them in, so running the job draws the stock down.

From the real plates

In the Automation workflow, the Spot UV / foil plates step now measures the plates it makes — the actual thickness map for varnish, and the rows and columns that carry foil — and writes coating-usage.json and the variables [var.varnishMlPerSheet], [var.foilFeetPerSheet] and [var.coatingCostPerSheet]. Give it the number of press sheets and it adds the job totals ([var.varnishMl], [var.foilFeet], [var.foilRolls], [var.coatingCost]). Run it on the imposed sheet so each plate page is one side of one sheet. Foil wider than the roll is flagged.

If an MIS job link step comes first and Put the measured usage on the MIS job is ticked (it is by default), the measured figures go onto that job: its varnish and foil lines and its history, and ROI reads them. The job is not re-priced — the quote has gone to the customer, and the history line shows what the estimate said against what the plates say.

In ROI

In Shop mode, ROI takes consumables per sheet for the DDC-8000, DDC-810 and DFL-700 from the varnish and foil your jobs actually use, weighted by sheets. Varnish goes to the coater the job ran on, foil to the foiler the estimate named. Until a job has coverage entered, ROI keeps its sample figure.

Dispatch

Most print orders do not go out in one piece, to the billing address, with the printer's name on the box. So a delivery here is its own record: a quantity, its own copy of the address it went to, a carton list, and a bin code. Splitting an order is not a special mode — it is two deliveries with a quantity each, and the job knows what is still on the floor.

Carriers, tracking links and the address check all work with the line down: the tracking URL is built from the carrier's own public address, and the address check is a format check — a blank street, a four-digit ZIP, a state typed as “Tex”. It deliberately does not claim the address exists, because calling a format check “verified” is how a box goes confidently to a house that was demolished in 1998.

The Dispatch screen is the shipping desk's own list: every job finished and still waiting, and everything that has gone out with its tracking and carton count. One person doing the shipping should not have to open jobs one at a time to find the work.

Shipping and invoicing

Record a shipment with the carrier and tracking; shipping the whole quantity marks the job shipped. One invoice covers any number of that customer's finished jobs — a shop that ran four jobs for the same customer this week bills them once — priced at what each job was quoted at, which is what the customer agreed to. Paying an invoice in full closes its jobs.

Invoices, quotes & estimates on paper

Reports are for the shop. These three are for the customer, and they are written from the live record rather than from what is on the screen, so the PDF and the MIS can never disagree about what was quoted:

The letterhead, the wording and an optional logo are set in Cost centers & setup under Invoices, quotes & estimates. The logo is copied into the MIS folder rather than pointed at where you picked it, so it keeps printing after you tidy your desktop; with no logo the company name is set in type instead.

Getting it to the customer

Every one of these documents saves as a PDF wherever you choose and is offered to open. Three of them can also be emailed straight from the MIS with the PDF attached — a quote, from the row in Quotes & estimates or from the estimator once it is saved, and an invoice, from its row in Invoices. Estimates, purchase orders and packing slips are save-and-send-yourself.

How a quote gets accepted

A printed quote carries a way to accept it. If your shop runs a customer-facing portal, put its address in the document settings and the quote prints an Accept this quote online link that opens the portal with the quote number already in the URL. With no portal — which is most shops — it falls back to Accept by email: a mailto link that opens the customer’s own mail app with your address filled in, the quote number in the subject, and the body already written with blank lines for their PO number and who authorized it. Nothing to install and nothing exposed to the internet. If there is nowhere for an acceptance to go, no link is printed at all rather than one that leads nowhere.

Reports and exporting to PDF

Eight reports, each with an Export PDF button beside it, plus Print job ticket on any job:

The PDF is built from the stored data rather than from what happens to be on screen, so the two can never disagree — and the same code would work with no window open, which is what a scheduled "email me the WIP report" needs. Pages turn to landscape on their own when the columns need the width, headings repeat on every page, and the footer carries a page count so a report handed over with a page missing is obvious.

Alerts and notifications

The MIS raises nine events, and they go through the Suite's own notifier — the same one workflow and delivery alerts use. They appear in Settings → Notifications in a group of their own, so each is routed to desktop, email or text, and silenced, exactly like everything else. There is no second notification setup inside the MIS; the button on its setup screen just opens that tab.

Late jobs and overdue invoices are the two that go wrong by the clock rather than because somebody did something, so they are swept periodically rather than raised by an action. Each one announces itself once — a job that is a week late does not send the same alert every half hour until the whole category gets muted. Moving a job's due date is a new promise, so it is allowed to warn again against the new date. Check for late work now on the setup screen runs the sweep on demand.

Appearance & themes

The theme selector sits in the header of every MIS screen, and again on Cost centers & setup. It is a per-machine preference, so the office terminal and the floor station can each be set the way that room needs.

Each theme also carries a color per department — prepress, press, cutting, finishing, embellishment, bindery, mailing, shipping and outside work each get their own hue, mixed against that theme's own paper so the same board reads correctly on white, linen and near-black. The color is doing a job: on a board of thirty cards, "which of these are sitting in bindery" is a question you want to answer by glancing, not by reading every card.

Locking Cost centers & setup

The rates every estimate is built from live on one screen, and on a terminal the floor shares that is usually a screen you would rather nobody wandered into. Password-protect this screen on Cost centers & setup puts a password on it.

What the lock covers: cost centers, stock, routings, the shop defaults, and clearing the sample data. What it does not: quoting, jobs, the board, the shop floor, shipping and invoicing all carry on untouched — and so does the theme.

• It is enforced in the application's main process, not just hidden in the window, so the screens are not the only thing standing in the way of an edit.
• It re-locks when the MIS window closes. There is also a Lock now button.
• Changing or removing the password needs the current one.
• Only a salted hash of the password is stored — the password itself is never written to the data file, and two installs using the same password do not produce the same hash.

The job code — one number for the whole suite

Every job in the MIS has a number, J-260001 style, and that number is now the one the rest of the suite works to. Before this you could easily have three names for one job: a template name in the imposer, a barcode number on the sheet, and the MIS job number in the office. Reconciling those after a reprint went wrong was somebody's afternoon.

In ImposeIQ, ImposeIQ Book and ImposeIQ VDP there is a Job… button in the header. Click it, pick the job — or scan the sheet, the search box takes a barcode wedge and Enter — and four things happen:

• The job's own DC barcode number goes into the Number (1–250) field, and Auto-assign is switched off, because the number now comes from the MIS rather than from the next free slot.
• The job code goes into the QR, alongside the user code, barcode, sheet number and filename. It is a new tick-box in DC Marks → QR content, on by default. One scan at the cutter or the folder now gets you the MIS ticket, not just the sheet's own number.
• The job code leads the slug line on the sheet, ahead of the filename and the sheet size — it is the one thing on that line that identifies the work rather than describing it, so an operator holding a stray sheet reads the ticket number first.
• When the sheet is exported, a line is written back onto the job's own history in the MIS — "ImposeIQ imposed — 8-up on 13 x 19 (job.pdf)" — so the job's timeline is the whole story and not just the part that happened after it reached the press.

In the Storefront there is nothing to pick: an order that the MIS has taken in shows its Job # in the order lists and in the order itself, so the person on the phone about an order and the person looking at the board are quoting the same number.

Nothing here can change a price, a routing or a status from outside the MIS — an app can find its job and add a line to its history, and that is all. The button hides itself in a build with no MIS, so you never see a control that cannot work.

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