Printing Labels – The Hidden Costs

Many small and medium sized (& some large) companies maintain their business’s using Microsoft Excel to manage a lot of their financial and product information.

In terms of product information it is common for a business to use Excel as a form of product database.  However printing on-demand barcode labels for product identification, warehouse or shipping labels from within Excel is not possible without a label design and print software solution with a database link to the Excel file.

It is strange that so many businesses have chosen to use free of charge sample label design programs, or low cost programs without any support for printing from Excel.  This means that these businesses have had to create an individual label for each product, and open and print the label for each product when required.

The problem for Existing Products/Customers

Although the information already exists in the spreadsheets, the result is that when the label design needs to be changed or updated, EVERY label needs to be opened and amended.

The problem for New Products/Customers

Although the information will be entered on the Excel worksheet, the result is that someone will need to find the time to create a new label for EVERY new product.

How many labels do you have and how much would it cost you to amend them?

It is not uncommon for a company to have hundreds, sometimes thousands of products and therefore labels that need to be amended from time to time (compliance changes, customer change requests etc), resulting in significant labour costs to amend the many individual product label files.

Example: If you had 200 products (i.e 200 labels) and it took around 10 mins to amend,test & save each label, it would take over 32 hours. Even at an average cost of £12.50 per hour, the total cost to you would be £400.00, and that’s EVERY time you need to make a design change.

Yet the answer is very simple and very cost effective.

From just £195.00 you can use a label design program that offers a very easy to use label design solution that supports printing labels from Excel.  Instead of creating hundreds of product label files, you simply create 1 label template that uses variable data from the Excel file.

This means you only have 1 or 2, or at worst a few label templates to manage for all your products and all of your customers.

Ask yourself, can you really manage and amend hundreds of product labels for less than £195, or should you be using a simple solution that takes minutes to amend and can literally saves you £000’s?