For
Independent Australian print, wide-format and sign shops with 1 to 15 staff, still quoting from spreadsheets or memory. Shops where the costs live in one head and a week off is a myth.
About
Built on a shop floor in Tumut, not in a pitch deck.
Krino is a cutting edge quoting and job system for Australian sign and print shops. It wasn't designed in an office by a committee and then shopped around for a market. It was built inside a working print shop, to fix a problem that printing and signage shops have every week.
This is how that happened.
A shop with a quoting problem
Katopra is a print and sign shop in Tumut, NSW. It does what most regional shops do: banners, signage, vehicle wraps, business cards, the lot. Small team, wide range, no two weeks the same.
And like most small shops, quoting was the slowest thing it did.
A customer would ring for a price on a job that was a bit different from the last one. Someone would open a spreadsheet, dig out the material costs, work out the print time, guess at the assembly, add the install, and come up with a number. Then the printer would need attention and the quote would sit half-finished. Two people quoting the same banner would come back with two different totals. Last month's buy price would still be on the quote going out this week.
The person who knew the prices was also the person doing the work. The shop was always a few quotes behind, and every quote that went out late was a job that might not come in at all.
We knew it was a software problem. We just couldn't find the software.
What we tried first
The first attempt was spreadsheets and calculators built in-house. They worked, right up until a product changed, which in a sign shop is about weekly. Every change meant someone rebuilding formulas instead of running the shop.
Then came the commercial MIS systems. Katopra trialled several and looked at almost every one in the industry, with real jobs rather than demo data. They were impressive, and they were built for someone else. For 40-person plants with a fixed product list, a prepress department, and a person whose whole job is keeping the system fed. They assumed you already knew exactly what you sold and would keep selling it. None of them priced time the way a sign shop actually spends it. None of them stayed current on material costs without someone babysitting them. And none of them were flexible enough for a shop that quotes a wrap, a shopfront and a run of flyers before lunch.
We didn't need a bigger system. We needed one that thought like a small shop.
The version that priced one thing
Cameron Gilroy came to this from the workshop, not the software office. He's a joiner by trade, with years on the factory floor building kitchens and commercial office furniture, then more than ten years in print, signage, design and video production. He has also been writing software for 25 years. That mix matters: he'd quoted the job, cut the material and chased the invoice, so he already knew which questions to ask. Why does that quote take an hour? Where does the material cost come from? Who decides the markup? What happens when the customer changes the size?
The answers became the first version of Krino. It priced one component. That was all it did.
It took about a day of the staff using it before they asked the obvious question: why can't it do everything else in the shop?
So it did. One job type at a time, with the shop running on it the whole way. Every formula was tested on a real quote before it shipped, because that quote had to go out that afternoon. If a number was wrong, the shop found out the same day, and the next version fixed it. There was no gap between building the software and using it.
What changed
Twelve months on, Katopra runs on Krino every day.
Quoting used to need a tradesperson who knew the prices by heart. Now a new hire a couple of weeks in can quote most jobs, because the materials, formulas and markup already live in Krino. The shop prices the way the owner would price, whether or not the owner is in the building. A quote can go out within 15 minutes of finishing an on-site measure-up. The slowest step in the shop became one of the fastest.
Monica manages Katopra and runs the shop on Krino.
The numbers on our homepage are Katopra's. We date them, we show the method, and we update them, because a real shop's last 30 days says more than any brochure could.
Who we are
Krino is built by Celestia Pty Ltd, a software company based in Tumut, NSW.
Cameron Gilroy founded Krino and leads the engineering. He's a joiner by trade, spent more than ten years in print, signage, design and video production, and has written software for 25 years. Alongside Krino he's CTO of Blue Vineyard, a software company working with the not-for-profit sector. Krino is what happens when someone who has run a trade business also knows how to build the software it needs.
We're a small team and we're growing. For now, if you ring the number on this site, you'll get Cameron. There's no ticket queue and no offshore support line. The person who built it is the person who picks up, and that's how we find out what the next version needs to do.
Katopra, our development partner
Katopra isn't a case study we found. It's the shop Krino was built in, and it's still where every feature gets used before it gets released. New pricing formula? It gets checked against a job that's actually going out the door. New proofing flow? A real customer signs off a real proof in it first.
That's why we tell people to bring a real job to the demo. We're used to quoting live. We'll price your job in Krino in front of you, and if the number doesn't match your spreadsheet, you'll know in fifteen minutes which one of them is wrong.
Who Krino is for
Not for
It isn't a RIP, a franchise head-office system, or a plant MIS for 40 staff. If that's what you need, we'll say so on the call. We'd rather lose a demo than sell you the wrong tool.