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What Printer's Friend does
Printer's Friend is the system a garment decoration shop runs on. Screen printing, DTG, DTF, embroidery, vinyl: one workspace holds your prices, your blanks, your customers, your jobs, your invoices and your shop floor.
It replaces the usual pile: a spreadsheet of prices, a whiteboard of jobs, an inbox of artwork revisions, an accounting package that finds out about a job three weeks late, and the memory of whoever has been there longest.
The one-line version
A quote becomes an order, the order crosses the production board, dispatch issues the invoice, and the customer pays a hosted payment link. Every one of those steps writes to the same record, so nothing has to be re-keyed and nothing gets lost between systems.
The four surfaces
Printer's Friend is one application with four front doors. Knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion later.
| Surface | Who uses it | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace (the admin) | You and your staff | /app |
| Shop floor stations | Press operators, packers, QC | /workspace/floor-board, /workspace/operator/{role}, /workspace/scan, /workspace/timeclock |
| Customer portal | Your trade customers | /portal |
| Public storefronts | Anyone with the link | /shop, /store/{slug}, /campaign/{slug}, and the iPad kiosk at /workspace/kiosk |
The workspace is where nearly everything in these docs happens. It is organised into six navigation groups, and the whole of it is listed in the screen-by-screen map.
| Group | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | The morning view: what is due, what is late, what is waiting on a customer |
| Records | Customers, inventory, purchase orders, asset library, invoices, campaign stores, affiliate store editor |
| Pricing | Decoration methods, pricing rules, price lists |
| Operate | Quotes, orders, time on jobs, production, batch production, cycle counts, returns, messages |
| Insight | Reports, Demi (AI), coupons, promotions, broadcasts, templates, brand, invoice template, integrations, billing, audit log, API tokens, webhooks, workflow stages |
| Settings | Team |
What it is good at
- Quoting from rules, not memory. Quantity tiers per decoration method, per-customer price lists, setup waivers for repeat work, coupons and promotions. Margin is shown before you send.
- A production board people actually look at. Drag a card to advance a stage and the customer comm, the stock movement and any outbound webhook fire off that one move.
- Artwork approval that closes the loop. A signed one-click link, no customer account needed, and the decision lands on the order.
- Costing that includes labour. Garment and decoration costs are snapshotted onto each line at the time of the order; staff clock on to jobs at a floor station and their hours cost at their own rate.
- Customers doing their own admin. Reorders, approvals, invoice payment and messages in a portal that carries your brand.
- Selling without building a website. A public catalogue, per-club team stores, and time-boxed campaign stores for group buys.
What it deliberately does not do
- It is not a general accounting package. It issues and tracks invoices, and pushes them to Xero or QuickBooks. Your accountant keeps their ledger.
- It is not an art studio. It handles artwork versions, proofs, approvals and export, and its in-browser designer covers customer-facing one-offs. Serious separation and digitising still happen in your art software.
- It does not run your press. It tells the shop what to print and records what happened.
Where to go next
- How the shop model works if you want the vocabulary before you click anything.
- Create your account to start a workspace.
- The installation guide when you are ready to set the shop up properly.