The setup wizard
The four steps you must finish before the dashboard unlocks, and what each one is for.
The wizard collects the minimum PrintERP needs before it can be useful: what you stock, what you print with, and how much ink a job consumes. It has four steps — Business, Inventory, Assets and Ink Usage — and the dashboard stays locked until all four are done.
Why it cannot be skipped
Without at least one machine, one inventory item and one tracked ink, a production job has nothing to consume and nothing to cost. Skipping setup would let you create jobs that quietly record nothing — worse than being asked for five minutes up front.
Step 1 — Business
Confirm your business name, then name your main branch and give its address. If you run a single shop, the defaults are fine; just check the name reads the way you want it on screen.
This step is safe to repeat — going back and saving again updates the same branch rather than creating a second one.
Step 2 — Inventory
Here you record what is physically on your shelves right now. PrintERP pre-fills a suggested list — A4 paper plus black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink — which you can edit freely, or delete entirely and enter your own.
Each row needs an SKU, a name, a unit (ream, bottle, pack — whatever you buy it by), the quantity you hold, and the cost you pay per unit.
The cost you enter here drives everything downstream
Unit cost feeds paper cost per piece, ink cost per millilitre, and every job cost and margin figure after that. A rough number is fine to start — you can correct it later in Inventory Items — but a wildly wrong one makes your reports misleading.
Quantities entered here are recorded as an opening balance movement, so your stock history starts with an honest, dated entry rather than a number that appeared from nowhere. On the Free plan the ten-item cap applies at this step too.
Step 3 — Assets
Add your equipment: printers, cutters, laminators, anything you want to schedule work on. For each one give a name, a type, and its Production Speed in pieces per hour — the speed is what lets PrintERP estimate how long a run will take.
Anything marked as a printer can also have its ink tanks set up: one row per colour, with the tank's full capacity in millilitres and a link to the inventory item that fills it. Buttons are provided to pre-fill a standard CMYK or CMYKLcLm set.
Link each tank to an inventory item
The link is how a production job knows which stock a tank draws from. A tank with no link still shows a level, but jobs cannot account for its ink. See How ink works.
Step 4 — Ink Usage
The final step turns your ink inventory items into millilitre-level stock. For each ink, link the inventory item, then give the millilitres per bottle, the bottle price, and the minimum and maximum pages one bottle prints.
The page range is what produces your cost-per-page figure. Manufacturer figures are a fine starting point; refine them once you have run real work. Full detail in Registering an ink.
Note
Ink Management is normally capped at four inks on the Free plan, but the cap is relaxed during onboarding so you can set up a full colour set before deciding on a plan.
Finishing
When you finish, PrintERP re-checks that you have a main branch, at least one machine, at least one inventory item and at least one active ink. If something is missing it tells you exactly what, and you can step back and add it. Once the checks pass, the dashboard unlocks.
Can I change any of this later?
All of it. The wizard is a starting point, not a commitment — every screen it touches is editable from the sidebar afterwards.
I do not print — I only finish and cut.
Add your cutter or laminator as a machine and leave the printer toggle off. You will still need one ink registered to finish the wizard; register the ink you use least and set its stock to zero.
Open the setup wizard
Available until your business finishes setup.
Related guides
Welcome to PrintERP
What PrintERP does, how the pieces fit together, and the order to set things up in.
Adding inventory items and opening stock
Create the materials you buy, set their unit and cost, and record what you already have on the shelf.
Registering an ink
Link an inventory item, set millilitres per bottle, colour, price and page yield.