Pre-production statuses
Pre-production statuses track what has to happen before a job is actually ready to run, screens burned, blanks received, art approved, whatever your shop checks before someone hits the press. It shows up as a row of stoplights on the job, separate from your invoice pipeline.
This is a beta feature, invite-only right now. ManagePrint invites a handful of shops by email; an admin accepts or declines from a link. If your shop hasn’t been invited, you won’t see any of this in Settings.
How it’s different from invoice statuses
Your custom invoice statuses track one pipeline per order, from New to Shipped. Pre-production statuses are a separate set of checklists that live on the job itself and don’t touch that pipeline at all. Turning pre-production on or off never changes an invoice’s status.
Getting in
An admin at your shop gets an email invite and a link. The link explains what’s included and lets the admin accept or decline. Only an admin can answer for the shop, since accepting turns the feature on for everyone. Invites expire after two weeks; ManagePrint can send a new one.
Once accepted, a Beta features card appears in Settings → Account, showing what your shop has access to and a support email for anything that breaks. Leaving the beta from that card turns pre-production off, but keeps every category and status you built, so coming back doesn’t mean rebuilding.
Setting it up
Turn it on
In Settings → Workflow, find Pre-production statuses and flip the switch. Nothing shows on job cards until you do this and add at least one category.
Add a category
A category is one light, one thing you check, “Screens,” “Goods,” “Art approval,” whatever your shop calls it. You can have up to six. Past that the lights stop being readable at a glance on a job card, so it’s a hard cap.
Add statuses to it, in order
Add the steps a category actually goes through, in the order work happens, for example Not ordered → Ordered → Received. Order is the only thing that matters: the last status in the list is what turns the light green. There’s no separate “mark as done” flag to fall out of sync with what you typed.
Reorder or rename anytime
Drag statuses to reorder them, or the categories themselves. Renaming a status or category is safe and doesn’t touch any job’s current selection. Reordering the last position, though, redefines what “done” means for every job in that category, so do it deliberately.
Deleting a category clears it from every job that had it set. Deleting one status clears only the jobs sitting on that exact status. Neither touches anything else.
What it looks like on a job
Every category becomes one light:
- Green (filled) — the job is on the last status in that category. Done.
- Hollow, colored — someone has picked an earlier status. In progress.
- Hollow, dim — nobody has touched this category on this job yet.
You’ll see this stoplight in a few places:
- The production board, as dots next to the job’s scheduled date, and as full status pickers when you expand the job.
- The scheduler, as a compact bar on each job card (dots don’t fit alongside the invoice-status dot at that size).
- The worker’s job list, as read-only dots with a “Ready to start” or “Not ready yet” label. Workers see the same lights everyone else does, they just can’t change them.
Only admins and managers can change a job’s statuses. See Roles & permissions.
It warns, it doesn’t block
Pre-production is advisory. Starting production on a job (the tap that moves it to In Production) checks whether every light is green. If one isn’t, a dialog lists what’s outstanding and lets you continue anyway, “we’ll note that the job started early so the numbers still make sense later.” Assigning a worker to a job on the scheduler works the same way. Unassigning a worker is never gated.
Every override is logged, so an early start shows up as a recorded decision rather than a gap nobody can explain later.