Working hours and expected finish times in the print queue

A print that ends at 3am isn't really done until someone walks in and clears the bed. SimplyPrint uses your working hours and bed-clear time to give you honest finish estimates, so the numbers you see match what actually happens on the shop floor. This article explains how to set your working hours and turnaround time, how the expected-finish column reads them, and how the printers-page farm overview shows what will be done before your shift ends.

This is one of the spokes of the print queue. The same working-hours data also powers the estimates you see on the timeline and the to-do list, which sit on the same Print Farm plan and up.

Contents

• Why finish times need staffing info
• Setting your working hours
• Bed-clear (turnaround) time
• The expected-finish column
• The printers-page farm overview
• Finishing before shift end
• Related articles

Why finish times need staffing info

A naive finish estimate just adds up print times and tells you when the last layer finishes. That number lies the moment a print ends outside the hours anyone is around.

If a job finishes at 3am, the printer is technically done, but the bed is still occupied. Nothing else can start on that machine until a person clears it the next morning. So the real "this batch is ready" time is not 3am, it's whenever your team next walks in.

SimplyPrint accounts for this by asking two things: when is your account staffed (your working hours), and how long does it take to clear a bed and reload (your turnaround time). With those two inputs, every estimate becomes honest. The system never assumes a 3am bed clear, and it never tells you a print is "ready" before someone could realistically have cleared it.

Setting your working hours

Working hours live in your general account settings. They define which hours your account is staffed each day, meaning the hours when someone is around to clear beds and start the next print.

To set them up:

1. Open your account settings.
2. Find the working hours section in general settings.
3. For each day of the week, set the hours your team is on site.
4. Save.

You can set different hours per day, so a shop that runs short Saturdays or is closed Sundays gets accurate weekend estimates too. Hours you leave unstaffed are treated as time when no bed gets cleared, which is exactly what you want for an overnight or weekend print.

Bed-clear (turnaround) time

The other half of an honest estimate is turnaround, also called bed-clear time. This is roughly how long it takes a person to remove the finished print, clear the bed, and get the machine ready for the next job.

Turnaround works in three modes. Automatic uses an estimated bed-clear time, so you don't have to configure anything to get a sensible gap. A per-printer override lets you set a longer time for a particular machine that takes more work (a big-format printer with a heavy plate, say, or one that needs a wipe-down between jobs). And a whole-farm batch-clear time lets you set one figure that applies across the fleet when your team clears beds in a single sweep. The turnaround time you use is factored into every downstream estimate, so a queue of 40 short prints on one machine reflects the real gaps between them, not a fantasy where the next print starts the instant the last layer cools.

Turnaround time matters most when you run automated starts. If a printer can begin the next job on its own, the estimate still has to account for the moment a bed gets cleared, which only happens during staffed hours. That is why working hours and turnaround time are designed to work together.

The expected-finish column

Each item in the queue carries an expected-finish value. You will see it as a column in the table view of the queue, and on the big item view when you open a single item.

What makes it trustworthy is the staffed versus unstaffed indicator. A finish time that lands inside your working hours is treated as genuinely done, because someone is there to clear the bed and move on. A finish time that lands outside your working hours is flagged as unstaffed, because the print may be physically complete but the bed will sit occupied until your team is back.

This is the difference between "the printer stops moving at 3am" and "this job is ready to ship." The expected-finish column shows you the second one, which is the number you actually plan around.

The printers-page farm overview

Your printers page carries a row of farm-overview cards across the top, giving you the state of the whole fleet at a glance. These cards read the same working-hours and turnaround data as the queue, so the numbers line up with your expected-finish estimates.

The cards include:

• Next printer finish - which printer wraps up soonest, and in how long. Handy for "what should I check on next."
• Finishing before shift end - how many printers will be done before the end of your working day, with a clock you can change on the spot (covered below).
• Requires attention - printers with an error or a notification that needs a human to step in. (A printer that's simply paused has its own Paused card, so the two don't get conflated.)
• Awaiting bed clear - printers that have finished but still have an occupied bed. Clearing these is what unlocks the next print, so it ties straight into your to-do list.
• Ongoing - how many printers are actively printing right now.
• Offline / not connected - printers SimplyPrint can't reach.

The strip carries more than these. Depending on your fleet you'll also see cards like Idle, Paused, In maintenance and AI status, so treat the list above as the highlights rather than the full set.

Together these turn "how is the farm doing" into a few numbers you can read in a second, then click into.

Finishing before shift end

The Finishing before shift end card answers a question every farm operator asks near the end of the day: how many of these will actually be done before I leave?

The card shows a count of printers that will finish before the end of your working day, and right next to it there's an adjustable clock, for example "by 05:00 PM". You can change that time directly on the card without opening any settings.

That on-the-spot clock is the useful part. If you're leaving early, set it to 3pm and the count updates to show how many will be done by then. If you're staying late to babysit a deadline, push it to 7pm and see how many more you'd catch. It lets you ask "what's done by the time I head out" for any time you like, instantly, instead of doing the math in your head against the queue.

Because the card reads your working hours and turnaround time, the count is realistic. A print that finishes at 4:50pm but whose bed nobody will clear until the next morning is counted honestly against the staffed window, not waved through just because the last layer happened to land before five.

Related articles

• The print queue - the hub for everything the queue does.
• The print queue timeline - the Gantt view that uses your working hours to estimate when the whole queue finishes.
• The print queue to-do list - the prioritised checklist that turns "awaiting bed clear" and idle printers into the next physical action.
• The "Staggered Start" feature - space out simultaneous prints so beds don't all finish at once.

Updated on: 24/06/2026