Switching from Printavo

Moving a print shop off Printavo: what transfers, how customer and order history imports, what to expect in the first week, and how to leave again if it does not suit you.

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Printavo is a capable product and plenty of shops are content on it. Shops usually look elsewhere for one of three reasons: the monthly per-seat cost as the team grows, pricing that does not match how they actually quote, or wanting their data somewhere they control.

If that is you, this is what an honest migration looks like, including the parts that are work.

What comes across

The goal is a shop that is useful on day one rather than an empty system you have to populate before it earns its keep.

Customers import from CSV, with tags and notes.
Order history imports as a full backdated graph — estimate, invoice, payment and completed job — so reorder prompts and repeat-customer history work immediately rather than in six months.
Your price sheet comes across as a price matrix. Paste or import the spreadsheet you already use; headings stay as text instead of being mangled into numbers.
Open jobs are usually worth entering by hand. There are rarely many, and it is the fastest way to learn the board.

What is genuinely different

Expect these to feel unfamiliar for a week. They are deliberate design differences, not missing features.

Turnaround counts from art approval rather than from intake, so due dates move when a proof sits unapproved. This is the single biggest change to how the board behaves.
Pricing is not locked to a quantity-by-colours model. You define the sheet, which is more freedom and slightly more setup.
Job costing runs against real press utilisation rather than a flat hourly rate, so margins on paper will look lower than you are used to. That is the point of it.
You run the server, or we do. There is no middle option where a vendor silently owns your database.

A migration that does not risk the shop

Nobody should cut over a working shop in one weekend. This sequence lets you back out at any point.

Stand it up alongside Printavo and import customers and history. Nothing changes for your team yet.
Build your price matrices and quote two or three live jobs in both systems. Compare the numbers before you trust either.
Move new orders across while existing jobs finish where they started. No job gets migrated mid-production.
Cancel the old subscription once a full cycle has run through the new system, not before.

Leaving again, if it comes to that

A migration guide that ignores the exit is a sales pitch. This is the exit, and it is deliberately unremarkable.

Every table exports to CSV, including line items with size breakdowns.
The entire shop exports as a single JSON file.
The database is one file. Copy it and you have everything, with no fee and no support ticket.

Common Questions

Can I import my Printavo data directly?

Export your customers and order history from Printavo as CSV and import them here. Order history imports as a complete backdated record so repeat-customer features work from day one.

Will my pricing carry over?

Yes. Price matrices accept a pasted or imported spreadsheet and keep your row and column headings as text, so your sheet does not have to be rebuilt to fit a fixed model.

How long does a migration take?

The import itself is an afternoon. The sensible timeline is two to four weeks running alongside your existing system so you can compare quotes and let the team learn the board without pressure.

What does it cost compared to Printavo?

Self-hosted, the software costs nothing regardless of how many users you add; you pay for a server. Hosted, you pay us to run it. Either way there is no per-seat charge.

Is there a risk in moving to open-source software?

The specific risk people mean is a project going quiet. Because the source is public and your data is a single file you can export at any time, that outcome leaves you with working software and portable data rather than a lockout.