A commercial print shop loses money in the estimate, not on the press. A 5,000-run brochure is priced from sheet size, grain direction, imposition and run-up spoilage, plate counts per colour per side, make-ready time on a specific press, and whether the lamination goes outside. Dynamics 365 Business Central prices a sales line from a unit price or a price list — it has no concept of a parent sheet cut down into press sheets, no plate math, no per-press make-ready and run-speed rates, and no way to hold three alternative quantities of the same estimate side by side. So estimators end up in spreadsheets, the accepted price never reconciles to the job that was actually run, and the workshop finds out about the job when a printed docket lands on the bench.

The second gap is production. Business Central's Jobs (Projects) module tracks planning lines, usage and WIP for a professional-services shape of work: tasks, hours, resource usage. It does not model a job ticket moving through prepress, plate-making, press, cutting, folding, binding and despatch, with a live good/spoiled count at each stage, an ink and paper draw against a specific lot, and an outwork purchase order that must come back before finishing can start. Item Tracking gives you lot numbers; it does not tell you that reel PA-0442 has 1,180 sheets left after run-up. Consumption gets keyed in days late, and job profitability becomes a post-mortem rather than a control.

What we build is an AL extension for your Business Central tenant. Estimation lives in new tables — Estimate Header, Estimate Version, Estimate Component and Estimate Operation — where a codeunit computes press sheets per parent sheet from trim size, bleed, gripper and colour-bar allowances, derives plate quantity from colours per side and press units, applies run-up plus percentage spoilage per operation, and costs each operation against a Machine Centre card carrying make-ready minutes, sheets-per-hour and a rate. Version the estimate so one enquiry can be quoted at 1,000, 2,500 and 5,000 from a single recalculation. Accept a version and it materialises a Job Ticket: stage lines, planned material consumption bound to real Item/Variant/Unit of Measure records, and a linked Business Central sales document so the commercial side stays native. Paper and ink move through standard Item Journals and Item Tracking, so inventory valuation, costing and the item ledger stay Microsoft's — we post into them, we do not shadow them. Outwork raises a purchase order against a job stage and blocks the downstream stage until receipt is posted.

Around that core: table and page extensions surface the ticket on Item, Customer and Sales Order; event subscribers on posting codeunits keep the ticket in step when a shipment or invoice posts; API pages (REST API v2.0 / OData v4) expose estimates, tickets and stage postings so a shop-floor tablet, a Power App, a Power Automate flow or a Dataverse virtual table can read and write without a bespoke gateway; job queue entries handle nightly WIP revaluation and stalled-stage alerts; and dedicated permission sets separate the estimator, the press operator who may only post stage quantities, and the controller. Everything ships against the current Business Central release waves on SaaS and on-premises, as a per-tenant extension or — if you intend to resell it — packaged for AppSource submission. No table modifications, no legacy C/AL, integration through published events and interfaces so a Microsoft update wave does not stop your shop floor.

This is build-to-order. There is nothing to download today. You request a quotation, we run a scoping call — usually 30 minutes — to pin down your presses, finishing kit, paper buying units, spoilage conventions and how price should be presented to the customer, then we send a fixed scope and price. On confirmed scope, typical delivery is one working week: we build against your Business Central version, deploy to your sandbox for UAT with your own estimates and your own paper stock, then install to production in an agreed window with a rollback plan. You get the AL source, the git repository, technical and user documentation, a training session, and a post-go-live support window.