Print MIS and Arrowmics: what each is for.
If you need scheduling, inventory, and production-floor capture, you need an MIS, and some print businesses outgrow Arrowmics into one. If you need consistent quotations and correct invoices, Arrowmics does that for a fraction of the price, with no implementation project and 5 people included before a seat is charged.
Printavo, Ordant, DocketManager, PrintSmith Vision, and shopVOX cover the whole operation: estimating, job tickets, scheduling, inventory, purchasing, and accounting links. A twenty-person printer with a press schedule to keep is right to look there.
The one thing that is different, row by row.
The middle column is what the tool does; the right column is a rule Arrowmics keeps, and the link is where it is kept.
- Estimating
- Print MISEstimating built in, with size columns and unit costs the vendor defines.
- ArrowmicsYour own papers, printings by size and quantity tier, finishes, sheet counts suggested from the finished size, and a per-piece price per quantity; every rate is yours and dated.How we calculate
- Scheduling, inventory, the production floor
- Print MISYes: job boards, stock, purchasing, machine time.
- ArrowmicsNo. Jobs record the work sent to each vendor, every handover on a timeline, and what came back; there is no schedule, no stock, and no plan to add them.The chain and its locks
- Getting started
- Print MISAn implementation project, a data pack for offset pricing, and training.
- ArrowmicsTwenty minutes: import your price sheet or start from a demonstration price list, add a client, raise an enquiry, send the quotation.Importing a price sheet
- Who pays for a seat
- Print MISPer user: Printavo Lite $109 a month for two users, Standard $244 for five; Ordant from $295 a month; shopVOX Express $99 a month flat.
- ArrowmicsPer organization: $59 a month with 5 people included, ₹2,499 plus GST in India, then $9 (₹399 in India) for each further member. Free for one person.
- A cap on quotations
- Print MISPrintavo’s Lite plan caps quotations at 20 a month, according to a competitor’s review.
- ArrowmicsFree includes 15 quotations a month and says so; Team has no cap.
- Leaving
- Print MISReviewers describe MIS products as hard to leave once a business has built around them.
- ArrowmicsEvery list exports as CSV and the whole organization as one file, on every plan, whenever you like.Exporting your data
Where the facts about the other tools come from.
Prices and limits are what these pages said in the year noted. They change; the links are there so you can check.