Your printer's invoice: searching for savings; auditing your printer's invoice is a good way to uncover hidden ways to save money - if you know where to look

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 1990 by Alex Brown

Your printer's invoice: Searching for savings Deep in every production manager's heart is the fear that somewhere in a given printing invoice lies an inadvertent false economy or, worse yet, a flat-out billing error. Did the printer really run and bill the job in the most economical way? Would a few cunning changes in the imposition have allowed the issue to run for less? And what exactly constitutes a "like to like" pocket change, or the need to "silence cover wrap"? What really happens in a "washup per unit per side"?

Diligent production managers audit each issue's printing invoice to confirm that the printer has applied his prices correctly for the work. This maneuver actually involves two tasks: determining that the right prices were used, and that they were applied for the right quantity.

An audit of most prices is usually simple enough, but checking prep prices may involve a tedious reconstruction of the number of pages requiring a particular procedure. To complicate matters, the auditor must understand how the job ran, from impositions to binding pockets, to verify the invoice or to plan future jobs under the price list. Finally, printers seem to live for the chance to concoct idiosyncratic pricing systems, and even the most experienced production manager can be stumped by a brand new printer's price scheme.

This article will walk you through a few representative invoices, and will provide you with the background you'll need to unravel a printer's price lists.

Aside from its obvious merits as a parlor game, unscrambling a printer's invoice provides three dividends: We can verify that we've been billed correctly, dissect costs to report them to different cost centers, and learn how to apply prices for future work.

First, let's run through the basic pricing increments.

Presswork prices

Accurate audit of an invoice entails not only verifying that the right prices have been applied, but that they have been applied the right number of times. In most instances, this is simple enough--you know, for example, that you printed 250,000 copies of six 32-page signatures. But eventually we enter the labyrinth of pages and colors, and counting here is not so easy--particularly if the printer has a novel method of reckoning plates, forms, pages and colors.

The smallest presswork element we'll routinely encounter is a single color on a single page. Some printers turn this into a more philosophical exercise by distinguishing the first color page on a form from subsequent ones. They have a point, because opening up a new printing unit on one side of the web launches a hoard of new costs. In this pricing system, a price for the first page and a lower price for each additional page are the building blocks for the invoice. Printers who pinpoint the additional costs this way are steering their customers toward economies by making the initial cost of opening up an ink fountain higher than using the color on the remaining pages.

As a rule, you'll find this system at printers specializing in smaller runs of magazines that use color sporadically. It's conceptually satisfying to think of buying color presswork on the per-page level, since every page you confine to black represents some savings. Further, this pricing system makes customers keenly aware of imposition blunders--like allowing a single four-color page to appear on a form.

This pricing system leads us to two observations. First, we need to note that when we're analyzing costs, the average cost per page will vary when color is used selectively. This volatile average presents no problem in itself--as long as we remember its origin. Second, since the cost of the job will hinge on the relative economies in impositions, the decision about who controls pagination has a direct effect on the budget. Should the production manager guard the budget, or the ad and edit staff guard the magazine's pace and flow? There is no easy answer to this question, but it's important that any magazine answer if it its printer provides these price incentives.

Not all printers distinguish the cost of presswork on a per-page per-color basis, but all of them assign ink costs this way. For most press-runs, the system remains fair, but it rides on the presumption that the ink, sold to the printer in pounds, will be consumed consistently from page to page. When a job is estimated, it's assigned a percentage of ink coverage that governs the cost of ink per page. A magazine with lush photography really does consume more ink than one with spot illustration. But what about a magazine that includes both kinds of pages?

Discuss the coverage allowance your printer has set for you, both at contract signing and during the life of the job, to check for a variation between the estimate and the actual job. In some circumstances, you may be better off buying ink just the way your printer does--by the pound consumed. Instead of showing a price per-page, per-color, your invoice will show the pounds of ink actually used--priced at a markup of the printer's cost of the ink.