IntroductionBeta
Overview of PrintNow's Print MIS — an in-house manufacturing pricing engine that builds sell prices from real material and equipment costs using formula-driven production configurations.
Print MIS is PrintNow's built-in manufacturing information system for cost-based pricing. Instead of maintaining fixed price lists, you describe how a product is actually produced — the materials it consumes, the equipment and processes that run it, and the formulas that tie them together — and Print MIS calculates the true production cost, applies your margin, and returns a sell price. The same pricing engine runs in the Unified Admin's live preview, on the storefront calculator, and in the server-side recalculation that guards every order, so what you model is exactly what the customer pays.
Print MIS is built from three pieces. Materials and Equipment are reusable libraries you maintain once per storefront — your substrates and consumables, and your machines with their processes, speeds, and rates. Configurations bring them together for a specific pricing category, layering on quantities, sizes, turnarounds, options, formula variables, and margin rules. A category is priced by Print MIS as soon as you mark it as a manufacturing category and attach a configuration.
Formulas are authored in either of two modes — an advanced text editor with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and inline error checking, or a simple drag-and-drop block builder — and a live Preview tab lets you sample-price any combination of inputs and see the full cost breakdown before publishing. Materials, Equipment, and entire Configurations can be exported to Excel and re-imported, making it straightforward to copy a pricing setup between storefronts.
Print MIS
Configurations
Per-category pricing setups that combine quantities, sizes, options, formula variables, process steps, and margin rules into a complete cost-based price.
Materials
A reusable library of substrates, consumables, and packaging priced per unit, with optional weight and thickness for shipping and production formulas.
Equipment
Machines and their processes — hourly rates, run speeds, setup and takedown times, and volume-tiered click charges that drive labor and per-unit costs.
Formulas
The formula language behind every configuration — variables, operators, and functions — authored in a code editor or a drag-and-drop block builder.
How a price is built
A Print MIS configuration turns a customer's selections into a sell price in a predictable order:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Inputs | The customer's quantity, size, colors, page count, turnaround, and option selections are collected, along with built-in values like Area. |
| Variables | Named formula variables are evaluated in order, deriving intermediate values used throughout the rest of the calculation. |
| Process steps | Each production step runs on its bound equipment process — run time comes from the speed formula, plus setup and takedown — producing a labor cost, and any materials the step consumes add material cost. |
| Options | Order options contribute additional cost or material consumption, with smart triggers showing or hiding choices based on other selections. |
| Margin | The configured margin method (fixed, material/labor split, cost tier, or quantity tier) is applied over the accumulated cost, respecting any minimum price. |
| Sell price | The result is shown on the storefront calculator and verified again server-side at checkout. |
Print MIS is a per-storefront pricing engine and is distinct from the third-party Print MIS integrations (Presswise, OneFlow, SiteFlow) used for production routing and order fulfillment.