Printing cost: how to calculate press hour and makeready

"We do a hundred and eighty orders a month and the press is booked solid. The managers show me a fifty-eight per cent margin. And somehow I've spent three years unable to buy a second machine" — that's how Andriy, owner of a print shop in a regional capital, opened the conversation.

Sound familiar? The offset press hums through two shifts, there are more orders than last year, and the report shows a margin a restaurant would envy. Yet there is exactly enough free cash to reach the end of the month.

The reason is almost always the same. A print shop calculates margin as the gap between price and materials — paper, ink, plates. Everything else sits in "general workshop costs". But the main cost in printing is not paper. It is press time. And until that time is allocated to individual orders, you don't know which of them feed you and which eat you.

In this article we break the print shop into two units: the order and the press hour. And we show why two orders for the very same flyers can differ in result by a factor of twenty-eight.

The founder's road: from a risograph to an offset press

Andriy started with a risograph and a guillotine in a rented forty-square-metre room. He printed forms, notices, simple flyers. His maths was simple: take the money for the order, subtract paper and ink, the rest is yours.

Four years in he bought his first offset press; by year six he had a four-colour A2 machine on lease and had moved into a four-hundred-square-metre workshop. Printers on two shifts appeared, then finishing, prepress and two order managers.

That is precisely when the clarity disappeared. Orders were up fourfold, turnover was up fourfold. The profit was not.

"On the risograph I could physically see how long I stood over each job. On offset the time is eaten by the machine, and nobody sees it, because it doesn't look like a cost. It looks like work."

Why "number of orders" says nothing about money

A hundred and eighty orders a month sounds like a full workload. But an order in printing is not a uniform thing. One takes forty-six minutes of press time, another takes four hours. And in the log both look identical: one line.

The difference between them isn't size, it's what share of the time is consumed by preparation. Because a press standing in makeready consumes exactly as much as a press that is printing. It just produces nothing.

As long as every order sits in a single list marked "completed", you cannot answer the basic question: which ones should you take more of, and which should you turn down.

Life before orders became lines

The state Andriy lived in for almost three years is recognisable to any print shop that grew out of a single machine.

• Margin was calculated as price minus materials. Paper, ink, plates — and that was all. Press time did not enter the cost of an order at all.
• Makeready did not exist as a line item. It was part of "the printer's work" and was never tied to a specific run.
• Set-up waste was written off into general spoilage. Nobody knew how many sheets a particular order had burned getting to colour.
• Replacement plates after client edits were made free of charge. "Well, he's a regular customer."
• Rush orders were slotted into the schedule verbally. A twenty per cent surcharge felt like adequate compensation.
• Seasonality was treated like the weather. Winter is worse — and that was the whole available explanation.

None of these problems were technological. All six were bookkeeping problems — and that is exactly why neither the printer nor the manager could see them.

The key unit: the press hour

The first thing Andriy did was work out what one hour of his machine actually costs.

What a press hour is made of

The workshop runs up 740 000 ₴ of costs a month, and almost all of them exist so that the press can print.

• Rent on 400 m² of workshop — 95 000 ₴.
• Printers' wages, four people across two shifts — 196 000 ₴.
• Finishing: cutting, folding, creasing, three people — 108 000 ₴.
• Prepress and designer — 42 000 ₴.
• Two order managers — 76 000 ₴.
• Electricity, where the press is the main consumer — 64 000 ₴.
• Lease and servicing of the machine — 118 000 ₴.
• Chemistry, washes, spare parts, waste removal — 41 000 ₴.

The calendar time fund is 352 hours a month: twenty-two days across two shifts. But around fifty-six of those go to maintenance, breakdowns and waiting. That leaves 296 productive hours.

Divide 740 000 ₴ by 296 hours and you find that one hour of press time costs the shop 2 500 ₴. That is the figure that appeared in no order calculation whatsoever.

Makeready: the hour that costs the same for any run length

And now the most important thing in printing. Before every run the press has to be prepared: mount the plates, come up to colour, bring the registration in. On a four-colour machine that takes forty-five minutes.

What goes into makeready

Forty-five minutes of press time is 0.75 hours × 2 500 ₴ = 1 875 ₴. Plus a set of four printing plates — 680 ₴. Plus around 180 sheets that go to waste while the press comes up to colour — another 540 ₴ of paper.

That is 3 095 ₴ in total. And the figure is identical whether you print a thousand copies or a hundred thousand.

"Makeready is a tax on starting work. The smaller the run, the bigger the share of that tax each copy carries. On a thousand flyers the tax is bigger than the work itself."

Two orders that look identical

Take two real orders for the same A5 flyers, full colour both sides. Eight of them fit on an A2 sheet.

Order A is a thousand copies. That's 125 sheets of run plus 180 for set-up, 305 in total. The press does seven thousand sheets an hour, so the printing itself takes one minute. Total press time: forty-six minutes, of which forty-five are makeready.

Order B is twenty thousand copies. That's 2 500 sheets plus the same 180, 2 680 in total. Printing takes twenty-one minutes. Total press time: one hour six minutes.

What the manager sees

The manager uses the familiar formula: price minus materials. In order A the materials are 915 ₴ of paper and 680 ₴ of plates, 1 595 ₴ together. At a price of 3 800 ₴ the "margin" comes out at 2 205 ₴, or 58%.

In order B the materials are 8 720 ₴ at a price of 17 500 ₴. The "margin" is 8 780 ₴, or 50%.

By that logic the short order is the better one. Which is exactly why managers cling to them.

What is actually left

And now the same thing with the press hour inside.

Item	Order A: 1 000 copies	Order B: 20 000 copies
Price to the client	3 800 ₴	17 500 ₴
Press time	0.77 h — 1 920 ₴	1.11 h — 2 768 ₴
Printing plates	680 ₴	680 ₴
Paper including set-up waste	305 sheets — 915 ₴	2 680 sheets — 8 040 ₴
Finishing	400 ₴	1 200 ₴
Full cost	3 920 ₴	12 688 ₴
Result	−120 ₴	+4 812 ₴
Margin "on materials"	58%	50%
Real margin	−3%	27.5%

The order with the best margin in the whole shop's report actually makes a loss. The difference isn't the paper — order A only has 915 ₴ of it. The difference is that forty-five minutes of makeready landed on a thousand copies instead of twenty thousand.

Profit per press hour: a twenty-eightfold gap

But the number that matters appears when you divide the result by the press time consumed.

Order A: minus 120 ₴ over 0.77 hours — that is minus 156 ₴ per press hour. Order B: 4 812 ₴ over 1.11 hours — that is 4 347 ₴ per press hour.

The difference isn't twofold or fivefold. Between these two orders it is almost twenty-eight times — and both of them are called "A5 flyers, 4+4".

It is profit per press hour, not margin in per cent, that answers the question of which order to take when you have one machine and 296 hours in the month.

A third of the press runs at a loss

When Andriy sorted all hundred and eighty of the month's orders into two groups, the picture became uncomfortably clear.

Order group	Count	Press hours	Result
Short runs, up to 2 000 copies	124	99	−14 880 ₴
Long runs, over 2 000 copies	56	196	+269 472 ₴
Total	180	295	+254 592 ₴

Short orders are 69% of all the shop's orders and 34% of press time. And they deliver minus fourteen thousand eight hundred and eighty hryvnias.

That is to say, a third of the company's most expensive resource is spent on work that brings in nothing. Those ninety-nine hours, given over to long runs, would have produced more than four hundred thousand hryvnias.

Why managers chase short orders

Not because they work badly. Because their bonus is calculated from margin on materials — and by that logic the short run is the most attractive thing in the price list.

The manager does exactly what he is paid to do. Until the formula changes, he will keep filling the press with thousand-copy runs and sincerely consider it a success.

"For four years I paid my managers a bonus for loading the press with loss-making orders. And then wondered myself why there was no money for a second one."

The paper that went to waste

A separate item nobody sees is set-up waste. The first sheets after makeready go to the bin while the press comes up to colour. That's around 180 sheets per order, regardless of run length.

On a twenty-thousand run that's 6% of the paper — invisible. On a thousand-copy run it's 180 sheets out of 305, which means 59% of all the paper consumed goes to waste.

Over a month, a hundred and eighty orders produce 97 200 ₴ of paper that never became a product. In the report it is dissolved into the "materials" line and looks like perfectly normal cost.

Edits after the plates are made

Another item living outside the books. The client approved the artwork, prepress output the plates on CTP — and then an email arrives: "we've changed our minds, swap the phone number."

That means a new set of plates at 680 ₴ and a repeat makeready at 1 875 ₴. 2 555 ₴ for every such edit. The client is usually not charged — "it's a trifle, we work together."

At Andriy's shop there turned out to be twenty-three such cases a month. Together they ate 58 765 ₴ — four times more than the entire loss on short runs, and there wasn't one line about it in any report.

Rush orders that tear up the schedule

The most expensive of the invisible items. The client asks for it "today", the manager agrees and drops the job into the middle of a shift.

Why one rush job costs three makereadies

The press is already set up for the current run. To insert the rush job you have to take the current order off — that's one. Set the press up for the rush job — two. Come back and set it up again for the interrupted one — three.

Instead of one makeready you get three. The two extra ones are 3 750 ₴ of press time per insertion.

Andriy had fourteen such insertions a month. Cost: 52 500 ₴. And the rush surcharge was twenty per cent, roughly 800 ₴ per order: 11 200 ₴ in total.

The net result of rush work was minus 41 300 ₴ a month. The shop was paying its clients for the privilege of being hurried.

What the shop actually earned

Let's put it all together. The operating result on orders is 254 592 ₴. But two items that don't exist in the books take their share.

Item	Amount per month
Result on long runs	+269 472 ₴
Result on short runs	−14 880 ₴
Repeat makereadies from client edits	−58 765 ₴
Rush insertions, net	−41 300 ₴
Actual profit	154 527 ₴

One hundred thousand and sixty-five hryvnias — 58 765 plus 41 300 — is 39% of what the shop considered its profit. Two items, neither of which was in the price list, in the report, or in the manager's bonus.

"I kept wondering where the gap between the report and the bank account was going. It turned out it was going into two things I had myself allowed to be done for free."

Seasonality: the autumn peak and the winter slump

Printing is seasonal, and the season here is harsher than in most manufacturing. The peak is September to December: catalogues, calendars, packaging, Christmas products. The slump is January–February and the second half of summer.

The problem is that the press and the workshop cost the same all year round. 740 000 ₴ of costs in December spread across 296 hours of load. The same 740 000 ₴ in February spread across 170 hours — and the press hour becomes not 2 500 ₴ but 4 353 ₴.

Why you can't "make it up on volume" in January

Because in January there is nobody to print for. Clients have spent their budgets in December and the new ones aren't approved yet.

And here comes the temptation that ruins the year: to keep the press busy through the winter, the shop takes any short run at any price. The load recovers, the report looks decent — and the press hour on those orders isn't covered even halfway.

The right answer is different: in winter you should take not just anything, but what covers the press hour at least to zero. The rest of the time is better given to the maintenance there is never time for in December.

"Two years running I took cheap runs in February just to keep the press moving. When I counted the press hour it turned out it would have been better left standing: idle time costs less than a loss-making order."

What changed when orders became lines

Andriy did three things. The press hour went into the calculation of every order, with makeready as a separate line. The managers' bonus was rewritten from margin on materials to profit per press hour. And edits after CTP and rush insertions went into the price list.

Within two quarters the following became visible:

• Short runs went up 35%. The price rose from 3 800 ₴ to 5 130 ₴ and the result went from minus 120 ₴ to plus 1 210 ₴. Thirty-eight clients left for competitors, eighty-six stayed — and that group started bringing in 104 060 ₴ instead of a loss. Thirty hours of press time were freed up for long runs as well.
• Edits after plate output became chargeable — 2 555 ₴ per set. The number of such cases fell from twenty-three to six a month: clients started proofreading the artwork more carefully. Saving: 43 435 ₴ a month.
• The rush surcharge went from 20% to 60%. Half the "urgent" clients suddenly discovered they could wait until tomorrow. Eight insertions remained instead of fourteen, and they now at least partly cover their cost: minus 10 800 ₴ instead of minus 41 300 ₴.

None of these decisions required a new machine or new clients. They required seeing an order as a line — and seeing how many minutes of press time it took.

The takeaway for business owners. If your business is bottlenecked on one expensive resource — a machine, a chair, a floor, a crew — margin in per cent stops being the criterion. The criterion becomes profit per unit of that resource. Two orders with identical margins can differ in real value by a factor of dozens, and the only way to see it is to divide the result by the time.

Advice to close on

• Work out the cost of a press hour. Divide all workshop costs by productive hours, not calendar hours. That is the basis of every calculation.
• Put makeready on a separate line in every order. It is identical for a thousand and for a hundred thousand — and it is what decides whether a short run is worth taking.
• Count profit per press hour, not margin in per cent. When the resource is limited, what matters is not how much you earned on the order but how much you earned on the hour.
• Tie the managers' bonus to profit per press hour. While the bonus comes from margin on materials, they will honestly keep loading the press with loss-making runs.
• Book set-up waste against the specific order. On short runs it can exceed the run itself.
• Make edits after plate output chargeable. Not to earn from it, but so that the client proofreads the artwork before you output the CTP.
• Work out what urgency really costs. One insertion into the middle of a shift costs three makereadies, not one — and the surcharge has to cover that.

The money doesn't disappear — you just can't see it

Printing looks like a business where print quality and the price of paper decide everything. In reality quality is the entry ticket, and the money is decided by one thing: how much profit an hour of your press brings in.

None of these costs disappears on its own. But the moment an order becomes a line with its own time and its own makeready, you can see which run length feeds you, how many press hours go nowhere — and what you can do about it as soon as next week.

How to see this in your own shop

Everything described above rests on a single table: every order is a line showing the price, the minutes of press time it consumed, and the full cost including makeready. Most owners keep this in a spreadsheet and forget to update it after the third rush job. When the same data is collected automatically, profit per press hour is visible without manual arithmetic — which is exactly why small and medium business owners use Finmap: to see the financial picture instead of assembling it at the end of the month.

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Topic foundation: Management Accounting Explained: What It Is and Why Owners Need It