What to test in a print software demo

A software demo is a performance. The data is seeded, the job is clean, the person driving has done it four hundred times, and every click lands where they expect.

None of that is dishonest. It is just not information about your shop.

You can turn it into information by changing the terms, and almost every change below costs the vendor nothing to accommodate. If one of them is refused, that refusal is the most useful thing you will learn all week.

Bring your own file

Not their sample. A real job from last month, and ideally an awkward one: a 32-page booklet, something with a spot colour, a file a designer built with the bleed missing.

Software that handles a clean 8-page A4 handles the demo. Your work is not the demo.

Ask for the output, not the screen

Anything can draw a layout on a screen. Ask them to export the file and open it in front of you.

Then look at what actually came out. Are the crop marks there. Is the bleed real. Are the pages in the order the folder will need. Does the back line up with the front. A picture of an imposition and an imposed PDF are different products sold with the same word, and that distinction costs people money.

Change something in the middle

Half way through the quote, ask them to switch the paper. Then watch what moves.

The sheet count should move. The cost should move. The imposition should move, if the new sheet is a different size. If anything has to be re-entered by hand, that is not a demo hiccup — it is the architecture, and you will pay for it every day for years.

Quote a job you already quoted

Bring a job you priced last month and know the truth about: what you charged, what it cost you, what it made.

Then compare. If the software lands close, that is a real signal. If it lands far off, ask which input caused the gap. A vendor who can point at the input is showing you the model. A vendor who says the defaults need tuning has just told you the number was never yours.

Ask what it does when it does not know

Hand them a customer email with a hole in it. "Same as last time, but 1000 this time."

Watch whether the system fills in the missing specs anyway. Confident wrong values are worse than blank fields, because a blank field gets asked about and a filled one gets printed.

Ask about your press

Every estimating system ships with a machine list. Your press is on it or it is not.

Ask what happens when it is not. Can you enter the speeds, the make-ready, the click cost, the sheet range and the hourly rate — and can you do it, today, or does it need a support ticket and a fortnight? Shops change presses. The answer to this question is the answer to how long the software survives in your business.

Ask for a number

Ask what it costs. Ask what it costs next year. Ask what happens when you add a second user, a second site, or when the contract renews.

Most estimating vendors do not publish a price at all — of the well-known ones, we found exactly one that does. That is not a scandal, but it does mean you cannot compare without asking, and asking in writing is how you avoid having that conversation after your data has moved in.

Ask to see the boring screen

Every demo opens on the dashboard. Nobody works in the dashboard.

Ask to see the screen where a job actually gets entered, and count the fields. Then ask to enter one yourself. What decides whether software gets used is not the report at the end of the month — it is whether the person at the counter can get a job in while the customer is still on the phone.

Ask how your data leaves

Ask how you export your customers, your quotes and your prices, in a format something else can read, on the day you decide to go elsewhere.

It is not a hostile question and a good vendor will not treat it as one. It is the question that separates buying a tool from entering a hostage situation.

The rule that matters more than the other nine

Take the keyboard.

If the salesperson drives for the whole hour, you have watched a film. Ask to enter one job yourself, with them silent, and see how far you get.

The gap between watching an expert and being a beginner is the entire real cost of the software, and it never appears on the quote.

Where we sit

PressCal will fail some of these tests for some shops, and I would rather you found that out in the demo than in month three. We publish a price, the machine list is yours to edit, the imposed PDF exports, and the button that gets your data out is where you would expect it. Apply the list to us exactly as you apply it to everyone else.