The problem with estimating by itself is that you are never really aware of how accurately your estimates reflect your costs and profit until it's too late! 

Job costing is simply the practice of recording your actual usage of resources and consumables against each job, calculating the cost whilst taking into account the need to pay for indirect expenses (Rent, heating, coffee machine etc.).

Lets start by defining some terms here. First, what do we mean by 'direct' or 'indirect'?  The distinction is fairly crucial in this context.  Direct costs are the costs incurred by the need to produce print jobs. So that's things like paper and ink, and machine operators wages and indeed the costs of your machines themselves. They are directly chargeable because they are costs that are measurably incurred in producing a job for the customer. On the other hand indirect costs are not directly related to the printing work itself.  The directors' salaries (except if they are also running the presses), the cost of book-keeping, and even the estimators' wages are all indirect - the estimator has to estimate jobs he doesn't get alongside jobs he does get.

We can also subdivide the direct costs into direct internal costs and direct external costs . Direct internal costs are those direct costs that form part of your fixed overhead - i.e. machine costs and people costs.  Direct external costs are the things that you buy in directly to produce your print jobs - i.e. paper, laminating, delivery services.

You can enter your direct internal costs into the records for Presses, Other machines and Personnel, where they can be used to calculate hourly rates.

Of course it is relatively easy to allocate direct costs to a job - it took so many hours on this machine at so much per hour and the operator's time can also have an hourly rate - but the problem we need to solve is how to account for the indirect costs.  In order to do this, you need to spread them over (absorb them into) your direct costs, so that at the end of any period you will have made sufficient allowance. This is known as 'Absorption Costing'.