Shop Management Software for Screen Printing

Shop management software built for screen printing: quoting by ink colour and location, screens and setup, a press-aware production board, and job costing against real press utilisation. Open source and free to self-host.

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No credit card required. The app itself lives at pro.printshopcrm.com.

Most software sold to screen printers is general shop-management software with a screen-printing label on it. The difference shows up in the details: whether the quote understands that a second location means a second setup, whether the board knows a six-colour run ties up the press longer than a one-colour, and whether the job cost reflects that the press is not printing most of the time.

PrintShopCRM was written inside a working shop, and it is open source, so you can read exactly how every number is produced rather than trusting a black box.

Quoting that speaks screen printing

The quote is where screen-printing shops lose money, because the variables that drive cost are the ones generic software flattens.

Price by ink colours per location, not a single colour count. One colour on the front and four on the back is not a five-colour job, and quoting it as one is how margin disappears.
One-time screen charges per job, with the setup counted once rather than per garment.
Dark garments automatically add an underbase, because forgetting it is the classic quoting mistake.
A size and colour grid with real per-size upcharges that flows through to the work ticket and the invoice, so quantity and the grid can never disagree.
Or ignore all of that and build your own price sheet: name the rows and columns yourself and type your prices in.

A production board that understands a press

Scheduling breaks when the software treats every job as one unit of work. Screens, setup and colour count are what actually consume the day.

Drag-to-move job board with rush, late, unpaid and assignee filters, built for touch so it works on a shop-floor tablet.
Capacity planning that schedules a prospective job against what is already committed and returns a ship date you can promise.
Colour count drives press time. A six-colour run reserves the press time it actually needs instead of a flat default.
Work tickets print with a hard "no approved art, do not print" block until the proof is signed off.
Barcode scanning on the floor feeds measured labour back into the job cost.

Turnaround that starts when art is approved

Your terms almost certainly say something like ten business days from proof approval. Most software stores a due date typed at intake and never moves it.

Approval-gated jobs recompute their own due date when the proof is approved.
A proof sitting unapproved in somebody inbox for four days stops quietly eating four days of production.
The dashboard surfaces deadlines that have already slipped, ranked by money at risk rather than by date.

Job costing that tells you what you kept

This is the part most shop software will not do, and it is the reason this one exists.

A press only actually prints roughly a quarter to a third of the clock. The rest is setup, approvals, breaks and packing.
Costing labour at a raw hourly rate therefore understates it by around three times.
That is how a job reads 40% margin on the quote and loses money in the building, and why owners only find out months later by watching gross revenue.
Every job is costed against your shop real utilisation, and you see the number while the price is still editable.

What it costs

Nothing, if you run it yourself. The licence is AGPL-3.0 and the source is public.

No per-seat pricing, no job limits, no feature tiers. One version with everything in it.
Node 22 and SQLite, four dependencies and no build step. Install is about three seconds, and it runs happily on a cheap VPS or an old office PC.
Hosting, migration and on-site setup are available if you would rather not run a server.
Your data stays portable: every table to CSV, the whole shop to one JSON file, and a database that is a single file you can copy.

Common Questions

What is the best shop management software for a screen printing shop?

It depends on whether you want to rent it or own it. Printavo, ShopVOX and InkSoft are capable hosted products billed per seat every month. PrintShopCRM covers the same ground, is free to self-host, and publishes its source code so you can verify how it prices and costs your work.

Does it handle screens and setup charges?

Yes. Screen charges are one-time per job rather than per piece, setup is counted once, and dark garments add an underbase automatically.

Can it price one colour on the front and four on the back?

Yes, and this matters more than it sounds. Pricing is per location with its own colour count, so a two-location job is not flattened into a single colour count.

Will it work for a shop that also does embroidery and DTF?

Yes. Build a price matrix per decoration method and let each line of a quote cite a different one, so a single estimate can mix screen printing on the tees, embroidery on the caps and DTF on the hoodies.

Do I need to be technical to run it?

To self-host, you need to be comfortable in a terminal for two commands, or run the Docker image. If that is not you, hosted setup is available and the software is identical either way.