Building a product recipe
Tell PrintERP what one unit of a product consumes: materials, paper, ink, and waste allowance.
A product is something you sell. Its recipe is what one unit of it consumes. The recipe is the single most valuable thing you will set up in PrintERP: it is what turns a finished job into an accurate stock deduction and a real cost.
A product with no recipe consumes nothing
You can sell a product with an empty recipe and the job will complete perfectly happily — but no stock will move and its cost will be zero, so it will look infinitely profitable. If your margins seem too good, check your recipes first.
Creating the product
In Products, press + Add Product and give it a name, an optional description and a selling price. Then open it — the recipe is built on the detail page, in three sections.
Decide what one unit means before you start, and put it in the name. “Business Cards (100pcs)” is unambiguous; “Business Cards” is not, and every number after it will be guesswork.
Materials
General inventory items — laminate, boxes, ring binders, glue. For each, give the quantity per unit and a waste allowance.
The allowance is a percentage added on top, so 1 box per unit with a 2% allowance consumes 1.02 boxes. Leave it at zero for things you genuinely never spoil.
Paper and canvas
Paper is chosen from the stock you registered in Paper, and measured in pieces per unit — the number of physical sheets one unit of the product needs, before waste.
Give it a waste allowance too. Setup sheets, trim and the occasional misfeed are routine, and a 3–5% allowance is typical for most short-run work.
Tip
If the paper dropdown is empty, no paper stock exists yet. The section shows a shortcut to Paper — register the stock there and come back.
Ink consumption
Ink is chosen from Ink Usage Management and measured in millilitres per unit. There is no waste allowance here — ink waste is worked out from spoiled paper when you record an error, which is more accurate than a flat percentage.
Do not know the millilitres? Work back from the cost-per-page figure on the ink screen. If a bottle prints 400 pages and your product covers roughly two pages' worth of coverage, two pages' millilitres is a fair start. Refine it once you have real runs to compare.
Checking your work
As you add lines, the product page recalculates cost, profit and margin live. That is your sense check — see Cost, price and margin for how each figure is derived.
One product, several paper types — how?
Add a paper line for each. A job finishing this product deducts every line.
Do I need a recipe for outsourced work?
No. Leave the recipe empty, set the selling price, and record what you paid the trade printer as an expense.
I changed a recipe — do old jobs change?
No. Recipes are read when a job is marked done, so completed jobs keep the cost they were finished with.
How many products can I have?
Five on Free, unlimited on paid plans. See Plans and limits.
Open Products
Create a product and build its recipe.
Related guides
Cost, price and margin on a product
How the product page works out unit cost from the recipe, and what the margin figure means.
Tracking paper by the piece
Link a paper item, say how many pieces are in a ream, and get a per-piece cost and balance.
Registering an ink
Link an inventory item, set millilitres per bottle, colour, price and page yield.