I’m baffled by sales people telling me that their estimating system is better than the other fellows’. From what I’ve learned they all do much the same, but some have lots of hidden costs for add ons – I know of one supplier that charges you for an upgrade once you go beyond 100 customers! I don’t want something like that. I’d be interested in one that was Mac friendly, although that’s not essential. We have eight people working here and do SRA2 work, on a five-colour Komori, and we also have a single colour Ryobi. I’d like any suggestions or help and many thanks for reading this!
Damien, via the forum at printweek.com

This question provided a great opportunity for the printweek.com online community to swing into action with lots of valuable help and advice, and I’ll share their suggestions here. ‘Boris the Fox’ said: "I’d look at Printpak. It is a very simple system (or was last time I checked it out), not sure about the use on Macs though. I’ll agree with your sentiments though about trying to be bigger and better and have wished for years they would look at simpler and easier. Perhaps creators of such software should take note. Failing that, get an Excel whizz in and see if he or she would write you a program to work for you, it’s not that pricey and can easily be done." Mick Hart also suggested the Excel route. Meanwhile, John Roche at Haybrooke, which supplies estimating system PDQ, popped up with this contribution: "I do agree that you can do a lot in Excel if you have the necessary level of expertise. I developed PDQ initially from spreadsheets (it’s probably where a lot of such products begin life if the truth be known). I even sold it in spreadsheet format to begin with. The problem I found was when the data-streams became large they also became unwieldy." Being in the business, John is of course au fait with the options for standalone estimating systems, and he suggested Damien should look at SpeedQuote (www.speedquote.net), Brightblue (www.brightblue.biz) and, naturally, PDQ (www.haybrooke.com). Or for Printpak see www.printpak.com. Damien also unearthed a Shuttleworth (www.shuttleworth-uk.co.uk) option during his own research. Many thanks to all the community members who offered help and advice, it’s precisely the sort of thing that makes the forum so valuable. I’d also suggest that Damien has a look for Me & My Machine and Product of the Week articles in the printweek.com archive featuring the products he finds of interest, too.