A commercial print shop does not quote a product, it quotes a calculation. Trim size, up-count on the parent sheet, grain direction, sheet wastage per make-ready, plate count per colour per side, ink coverage, folding and binding passes, and a finishing step that may leave the building entirely. Odoo's native sale.order line takes a product and a quantity, and mrp.bom assumes a fixed component list — neither can express "3,000 A5 flyers, 4/4 on 170gsm gloss, 4-up on SRA3, 12% make-ready waste". So estimators end up in a spreadsheet that lives on one person's laptop, the accepted price never reconciles with the paper actually issued from the store, and the press floor works from a printed docket that the ERP has never heard of.

We build a dedicated estimation and job-ticket layer on top of standard Odoo. A printing.estimate model holds the specification — trim size, parent stock, colours per side, print method, quantity and run-on quantities — and computed fields written with @api.depends derive the imposition (sheets up, parent sheets required, waste allowance by press and by make-ready), the plate count, the ink and consumable draw, and the cost roll-up across paper, plates, press time, finishing and outwork. A markup or target-margin rule turns cost into price, and confirming the estimate generates a native sale.order so quotations, invoicing and the customer portal stay Odoo-standard rather than a parallel universe. Repeat orders re-run the same calculation against current stock prices instead of copying last year's number.

On acceptance, the estimate produces a printing.job ticket with a stage-based workflow — prepress, plating, press, finishing, outwork, despatch — surfaced as a kanban board plus list and form views. Each stage records operator, machine, start and stop, actual sheets consumed and spoilage, so estimated versus actual is a report rather than an argument. Material movement is real Odoo inventory: paper and ink are products with their own units of measure and, where you want it, lot or reel tracking, and consumption posts stock moves against the job so valuation and reordering behave normally. Outwork (lamination, foiling, die-cutting, specialist binding) raises a purchase order against the subcontractor, holds the promised return date on the job ticket, and blocks despatch until the work is back. The job ticket itself is a QWeb report your press operators can print or open on a tablet, carrying the barcode or reference that links every subsequent scan back to the job.

Everything is built as a proper Odoo addon. A clean __manifest__.py with explicit dependencies, models under models/ inheriting models.Model and mail.thread for chatter and follower notifications, access control through ir.model.access.csv plus record rules so an estimator, a press operator and a manager each see the right slice, views in XML with OWL components only where an interaction genuinely needs one, server and automated actions for the routine nudges (overdue outwork, jobs sitting in prepress, estimates awaiting customer approval), and every model exposed over XML-RPC and JSON-RPC so your web-to-print storefront, MIS or shop-floor scanner can read and write jobs. It runs on Odoo Community — Enterprise adds the nicer planning and dashboard widgets and mobile barcode flows if you have them, and we ship a build that degrades cleanly if you do not. Supported on 17.0, 18.0 and 19.0.

This is a build-to-order product, not an instant download from the app store. You request a quotation, we run a scoping call to pin down your presses, stocks, imposition rules and finishing routes, and we send back a fixed scope with a price. Typical delivery is one working week from confirmed scope, depending on how many press and finishing configurations your estimator needs and whether we are integrating a web-to-print front end or existing machine data. You get the source, installed and configured on your Odoo version, with documentation, training and a post-go-live support window — and because we wrote it, we can extend it later instead of you inheriting an abandoned third-party addon.