Registering an ink

Link an inventory item, set millilitres per bottle, colour, price and page yield.

Registering an ink turns an ordinary inventory item — counted in bottles — into a millilitre-level ledger with a colour, a price and a page yield. Until you do, a product recipe cannot reference it and no job can account for it.

Before you start

The ink must already exist as an inventory item, with a unit of bottle (or whatever you buy it by) and a cost. Add it in Inventory Items first — see Adding inventory items.

The fields

Open Ink, switch to the Ink Usage Management tab, and add an ink:

Colours are free text

Colour names are tidied up when saved — surrounding spaces are trimmed and case is normalised — so “ black ” and “Black” are the same colour, not two.

Getting the page range right

PrintERP takes the midpoint of your minimum and maximum, on the reasoning that real-world yield sits between the two rather than at either extreme. From that it derives millilitres per page, and with the bottle price, cost per page.

• Start with the manufacturer's figures if you have them.
• Otherwise, track how many jobs a bottle survives and work backwards.
• A wide range is honest and harmless — it only widens the midpoint's uncertainty, it does not corrupt anything.

Reading the table

Once saved, each ink shows its remaining millilitre balance, pages per bottle, millilitres per page and cost per page. A dash in the yield columns means the numbers cannot produce a positive page count — fill in the minimum and maximum pages to bring them back.

Editing and removing

Edit an ink to correct its price, colour or yield. Deleting is a real delete, but it is refused if a product recipe still uses the ink — mark it inactive from Edit instead, which hides it from pickers while preserving history. Production waste records keep their history either way.