Pricing print jobs: what most shops get wrong
Most shops do not have a pricing problem. They have a record-of-pricing problem, and it shows up months later.
Two shops on the same street charge within ten rupees of each other for a visiting card. Neither of them can tell you which of their jobs made money last month. That gap is not about the price. It is about what happens to the price after it is quoted.
Where the number stops being true
The rate card that lives in one head
A shop has rates. They are correct. They are also entirely inside the owner, which means every quote given by anyone else is an approximation, and the approximations are always downward.
Writing the catalogue down once, with a rate against each item, is the single highest-value hour a shop owner can spend. Not because the rates change, but because it lets someone else quote without guessing.
Discounts that leave no trace
A रु 5,000 job goes out at रु 4,500 because the customer is a regular. Perfectly reasonable. But if the record says 4,500 and nothing else, then next month it says 4,500 again, and by the end of the year 4,500 is the price.
A discount recorded as a discount stays a discount. A discount recorded as a lower price becomes the new rate by accident.
Rush work priced like ordinary work
The job that jumped the queue cost the shop the three jobs it displaced. Very few shops charge for that, and the ones that do usually only remember to when the customer is a stranger.
The one report worth reading monthly
Not revenue. Revenue only tells you the shop was busy. What tells you something is the list of items sold, by quantity and by value, over a month.
It answers the question a busy owner never has time to ask: which of these things am I doing a lot of, and is the one I do most also the one I earn least on? That pairing is where the real pricing decisions are, and it is invisible from the counter.