Acing Repeat Orders, Better Financial Visibility
With Acumatica, Ink could see with a click of a button its actual financial results instead of just guessing.
“We have much better faith in our financial and inventory numbers, and we’ve streamlined our processes with Acumatica, and we’re moving though processes quicker because of Printshop,” says Condren. 
 
Acing repeat orders and delivering shirts on time are crucial to Ink’s success, and the seamless connection between Printshop and Acumatica allows Ink to continue to deliver excellent customer service. “Job scheduling is very, very crucial,” says Harris, adding Ink always delivers orders on time and when they say it will be ready. “A lot of software didn’t have that scheduling ability.”
Other print-specific software didn’t include the ability to capture information, such as pressure, mesh count and precise ink combinations, which is critical for a screen printer when printing repeat orders. 

Printshop delivers on those tasks while Acumatica gives Ink the budgeting, inventory control and cloud capabilities the company craved.
Watching Budget Closely.

“Acumatica’s accounting is deeply integrated with the ERP so we can do a really good job of analyzing our data,” Condren adds. “Most small businesses don’t last 31 years, but we have because we watch our budget closely and manage that well, so the financial side of Acumatica was a draw.”

So was the ability to scale and have better inventory control. “We’re growing and becoming more of an inventory fulfillment company so Acumatica gives us more scale and ability than we had,” Condren says. “Acumatica is already doing more than our last system could and we really haven’t really fully unleashed it yet.”

Print-Industry Specific
Understanding that its software could never provide everything a growing company needed, Acumatica was designed with an open API so that developers could create specific applications that could seamlessly connect. InfoSourcing is one such third-party developer.
“Harsha wrote a nice program that allows us to efficiently handle a lot of reorders,” Harris says. Many of the screen printers clients will buy say, 1,000 shirts one year and then want 500 the next. Previously Ink didn’t have a good way to store the vital information they needed to deliver what the customer wanted.
“Screen printing is very specific,” Harris explains. “It’s not like digital printing; every angle, pressure and mesh it goes on, that information is huge and we didn’t have a good way to capture it before.”
Scheduling print jobs is also critical, and Printshop provides that functionality, something that other print-industry software didn’t provide, he says.
Added Users Affordably
Harris previously had to prioritize which users could access Control since seat licenses were expensive and limited. “We now have a platform that can scale without penalizing us for doing well; encouraging sales growth not hindering it,” Harris says. “Previously, the limited number of users felt like a penalty for growth.”

Increased Accuracy
Condren exported data to spreadsheets to create reports, which was time consuming and tedious.
Tracking inventory was difficult and painful. “A couple of times a year we would think our inventory was right but then later we found it wasn’t, and we had a couple of $40,000 inventory adjustments,” Condren says. “Now Acumatica tracks inventory in the right buckets for us, and we can just click on a financial number on the balance sheet and drill down to the specifics about what’s behind that number.” 

Multiple Connected Applications
In addition to Printshop, Ink has implemented several applications that seamlessly connect with Acumatica giving them a truly connected business. Those third party applications include Ship Station, eBiz and Shopify. Ink is launching a new website soon and looking forward to taking orders online and having that information flow into its financial system seamlessly.
Ink is also integrating Acumatica’s CRM and may add a customer portal in the future, Harris says. “We want to eliminate the manual order entry and will have a fill-in form on our website to automatically generate quotes from our website,” he says.
“l love the idea that customers could have a place where they can read data so they can see what order is on time, see the production date, see the print date,” Harris says. “There’s a lot of lot of functionality our competitors at our level haven’t figured out yet and I anticipate being on the cutting edge of tech rather than being a step behind.”

Work from Anywhere
Cloud-based Acumatica allows Ink to work with graphic artists no matter where they live and for sales to grab information instantly from home rather than calling and asking someone to dig information out of the system for them, which wasted time.
Because Ink offers custom artwork, tracking version history and customer approvals with Printshop are important tools that help them provide great customer service. “Our competitors might have one or two artists on staff but we have five full time and two or three strategic freelancers,” Harris says. ”They all need access to details so it’s nice that they can access information from home. When work orders come in, they may design something that ends up having four revisions and we need to make sure we print the right version.” Printshop provides that, he says.
  
Built for Growth, Ready to Scale
Ink operates in a highly competitive industry, one that’s adding new players daily. “It’s now easier than ever to start a clothing line online,” Harris says. “Teenagers on Instagram who are good with Illustrator can design something and put up a mock up … and start a clothing line.”
“We’re excited that there is more interest than ever before but we want to make sure that we’re competitive and on a platform that can scale, one where we can analyze the numbers and know what our best fits are.”
Ink has already carved out a successful niche, and with Acumatica and Printshop, it can now add hundreds of new customers without the operational headaches they encountered previously.
In addition to becoming a fulfillment arm for customers, Ink now sells other apparel and promotional items, ranging from logos, mugs, water bottles, offering embroidery and hats and headwear.
“We’re growing on all fronts, and with Acumatica and Printshop, we are prepared for that growth,” Harris says.

Connecting Brands and Customers
InfoSourcing’s Sarjapur notes that brands of all sizes are investing heavily in promotional items – t-shirts, mugs, water bottles and other merchandise - to better connect with customers. More and more brands and companies are promoting these items and distributing them at various events like corporate annual meetings, sporting events and group outings to attract new customers.
These more brand conscious companies increasingly are turning to printers and embroiderers like Inc to reach these customers and any screen printer, embroiderer or promotional product distributor needs the ability to scale efficiently if they are to capitalize on these new opportunities.
“Anyone in the custom printing business will need Acumatica and Printshop to grow their business,” Sarjapur says. “Printers can’t do the things they’ve been doing for the last 20 years. They need to position themselves for digital transformation. If they don’t, they will be left behind. They won’t be prepared to manage higher volumes or attract more customers.”