Based in Monaghan, Ireland, Pricer Software’s new platform has been in beta testing with Brandpack for over two years, “with great success in connecting sales, pre-press and production” according to the supplier.

Key features of the new software include an e-commerce offering that Pricer said has been developed with careful consideration in relationally mapping the products, categories, pricing models, artwork, order, and production tracking data to connect all departments as well as customers with automated reporting, tracking, and payment facilities.

The Pricer quotation engine, meanwhile, allows sales staff to create their calculators using Excel spreadsheets. This is uploaded to the product and converted to C# to become a part of the workflow.

Pricer said this allows the use of pre-existing and complex business estimation logic to be used with ease within the e-commerce and workflow pages, “perfect for the printing industry where a company may have a diverse product range, each with very different costing structures.”

Quotations created are sent directly to customers’ email addresses using the Azure Cloud and SendGrid API with an automatically generated PDF quotation and payment provider for complete automation.

The software’s order management has been designed to increase workflow efficiency and give users and departments all the information they require to manage each order, with the ability to filter and search through orders for department pertinent details.

The order manager includes order and quote numbers, job and item specific details, order and due dates, dispatch types, order and progress statuses, customer and production specific notes, customer or pre-press file uploads, artwork approval tracking, and press ready files.

The production dashboard provides staff with order management interface for tracking current and upcoming orders, separated into departments and products with click function filtering.

Price scraping robots have also been added to the Pricer software feature list, “to take the time and human error” out of the quotation process.

The software can scrape large amounts of pricing data directly from supplier websites or documentation for quotations, business automation, competitive analysis, or general information.

The scraper “retrieves huge datasets across supplier websites for various product configurations and exports the data to an Excel sheet, data store or does some other business logic with the retrieved data such as prepare a quotation based on user inputs that are generated directly from your supplier website in real-time”.

Users can then add their markups and service fees in code, completely automating their pricing and quotation processes with the scraping robots.

Lead developer Jonathan Macleod-Elliott, a certified C# developer who wrote the software himself, said it is geared towards those who don’t have the resources to develop in-house software, but need to take their businesses to the next level online and want to save time when pricing and sending custom quotations.

He told Printweek: “The USP is the flexibility the quotation engines provide for diverse product lines, connected to a modern e-commerce CMS, at an affordable price for small to medium printing companies.”

The price on shared hosting with Azure is £59 per month and Pricer is selling it directly.