Compared with spreadsheets
Spreadsheets and Arrowmics, honestly.
Excel is the estimator’s craft, and a working sheet is worth keeping. This page is about what happens after it: the second estimator, the paper price change, and the quotation nobody can find.
A spreadsheet is free, flexible, and already yours. On the printers’ forum it is still the first recommendation for a print business that has its formulas worked out, and that advice is sound.
Side by side
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.
- A rate changes
- SpreadsheetsOverwrite the cell. Last quarter’s rate is gone, and every old quotation on the sheet now shows a new number.
- ArrowmicsA price is a dated row that applies from the day you choose; the old row stays as history and a sent quotation keeps the rates it was priced with.How prices work
- A second estimator
- SpreadsheetsTwo copies of the sheet and, soon, two answers to the same enquiry.
- ArrowmicsOne engine, one set of prices. Members quote with the rates and cannot change them; owners and admins set prices, and every price says who set it.Roles, in writing
- Numbering
- SpreadsheetsA number typed by hand, or none.
- ArrowmicsEvery enquiry, quotation, order, and invoice takes the next number for your organization and numbering year, and a number is never reused: a correction is a credit note with a number of its own.Numbering, on the product page
- From the quote to the invoice
- SpreadsheetsRetyped into the invoice template, with the risk that brings.
- ArrowmicsThe order copies the quoted per-piece price; the invoice opens with the ordered lines. Re-pricing a quotation updates its orders, and an order with invoices is locked.The chain and its locks
- The customer’s copy
- SpreadsheetsPrint to PDF, attach, and hope the right version went.
- ArrowmicsA PDF from the quotation’s page, sent by email or WhatsApp or as a link the customer opens without an account, with every send on record.Sending a quotation
- The sheet you already have
- SpreadsheetsIt stays where it is.
- ArrowmicsImport it. The price sheet’s rows become dated prices on the entries they name, and the preview shows exactly what will be written before anything is.Importing a price sheet
- Finding what was quoted
- SpreadsheetsThe file with the date in its name, on the laptop it was made on.
- ArrowmicsOne search box over every client, project, and document, and every list exports as a spreadsheet at any time.Exporting your data
Sources
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.
In short