Digital printing technology is increasingly perfect, enabling printing companies to meet the changing needs of companies and 21st century printing customers. Digital printing equipment is not only very suitable for printing short-run prints with fixed information, but also for printing customized and fully personalized prints, so that printing companies can provide customers with a variety of high value-added printing services. To adapt to such rapid changes and growing market demands, insights, product development skills, data processing knowledge, and prepress processing capabilities are needed. It is also necessary to pay close attention to printing production costs and develop a suitable print quotation plan. . With the widespread adoption of color digital printing technology, the black-and-white digital printing used in the copy shop has been applied in the traditional commercial printing field. Although this method of pricing at a print per page or per page cost is quick and easy, it is not appropriate to use this method in a commercial printing company (printing fixed or variable content prints). Because this popular digital printing cost analysis usually does not take into account the full cost of the printing production process. And this incomplete costing method creates a misconception for print customers that this is the right price for digital printing. In fact, the price of digital printed single-page prints is often higher than that of equipment manufacturers; if the printing manufacturers want to make profits, the price quoted to customers cannot be the cost price. Moreover, since personalized print can stimulate more customer feedback, on-demand printing for a specific target group can reduce the amount of print, reduce the amount of print inventory, the value of the customer has actually been fully improved. The reduction in the volume of printed copies of the old version enables customers to obtain the latest, flexible, and diverse prints with minimal investment. Digital printing companies should therefore receive more returns. Hourly cost calculation method In commercial printing companies, there are many different methods of calculating costs and prices. The most widely used is the hourly rate calculation method. It is usually used to determine the production costs of various costing centers such as prepress, printing, and various postpress processing. The cost of the job accounting at all costs is multiplied by the rate, plus the direct material cost, to calculate the cost of the job at a cost center. The total cost of job production plus the total cost of the printing company (ie, management costs and sales costs) is the total cost of the job. Based on this, plus the profit portion, the result is the final sales pricing. The practice of dividing the production process into different cost accounting centers has been widely accepted by the commercial printing industry. Although this costing system was developed for offset printing, it is equally applicable to digital printing processes. Digital printing system should be divided into multiple cost accounting centers Unlike traditional offset printing, digital printing systems integrate prepress and printing operations. Its super-functional workstation can handle prepress work as well as print jobs. It is possible to establish an independent cost accounting center objectively. Taking Heidelberg’s new era NP2100 as an example, a digital press can become a cost accounting center, and its workstations with prepress (including RIP) and print control functions (NexStation) can be seen as another cost accounting center for the implementation of Different jobs use different rates. When a workstation controls prepress operations, it can use one rate; when it controls production operations, another rate applies. When a workstation is used for prepress and production control at the same time, a multi-task cost calculation method is needed. When dividing the cost accounting center, you need to consider the workflow of the digital job. By analyzing the specific types of job and job flow in each case, the printing company can accurately measure the cost of the job and formulate its own best quotation plan: 1. All job preparations and prepress work for variable data have been processed offline. These jobs can be done by the printing factory's prepress process, or by the printing customer or other unit. When the data is transmitted to the digital printing control workstation, it is already an electronic document prepared for completion before printing. Although at the moment you can make a final check of the data before exporting or make some minor adjustments, in general, the documents sent to the control workstation should be ready for immediate printing. The content of these electronic documents can be fixed or variable. 2. The original data file is transmitted directly to the control station. Subsequently, all data processing work, formatting procedures, and processing of variable content are performed by the software of the digital printing system. The page layout work can be completed by the designer after being completed offline and input to the workstation. It can also be done directly on the workstation. This type of preparation is generally suitable for variable data printing. But it can also be used to print fixed content. 3. Hybrid data processing. That is, some steps are done offline (possibly by the customer) and some steps are done on the workstation. If a digital printing system is mostly used for the printing of fixed information, and only undertakes little or no prepress processing work, or the processing of variable information is all done offline, then the workstation and the printing press are assigned to a cost accounting center fee. The rate can meet the requirements. However, if the workstation performs both prepress and press control, it is best to use two different costing center rates.