Working hours and expected finish times in the print queue

A print that ends at 3am may still occupy its printer until someone walks in and clears the bed. SimplyPrint uses your working hours and bed-clear time when planning follow-on work, and marks whether an expected finish lands inside a staffed period. This article explains how to set your working hours and turnaround time, how to read the expected-finish column, and what the printers-page farm overview counts before your shift ends.

This is one of the spokes of the print queue. The same working-hours data powers estimates on the timeline and can schedule the to-do list digest for the start of your shift. Both features are available on Print Farm and up.

Contents

• Why finish times need staffing info
• Setting your working hours
• Keep backburner prints outside 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 basic finish estimate only tells you when the last layer finishes. It does not tell you whether anyone will be present to clear the bed for the next job.

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). The queue timeline uses those inputs when scheduling follow-on work. The expected-finish value itself remains the predicted end of the print, with a separate staffed or unstaffed indicator for that moment.

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 working-hours-aware weekend estimates too. Manually cleared printers wait for staffed hours before follow-on work. Fully automated self-clearing printers can continue outside working hours.

Keep backburner prints outside working hours

Backburner items are useful filler work, but an office may need its printers free for prototypes and test prints while staff are present. Under Settings > Queue, enable Only print backburner items outside working hours to reserve the staffed part of the day for normal-priority items.

While the account is inside its working hours, 1-Click Print, AutoPrint and Quick Queue skip backburner items. After hours, 1-Click Print and AutoPrint may use backburner items when no normal-priority item matches, while Quick Queue shows compatible backburner items alongside normal items. The rule follows the timezone configured for working hours, the weekly schedule, special-date hours and temporary overrides.

Bed-clear (turnaround) time

The other input for planning follow-on work 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 based on available printer data. 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 downstream scheduling, so a queue of 40 short prints on one machine includes gaps between prints instead of assuming each next print starts immediately.

Turnaround time matters most when you run automated starts. For a manually cleared printer, follow-on work waits for both the next staffed period and the configured turnaround. A fully automated self-clearing printer includes its automatic clearing turnaround and can continue outside working hours.

The expected-finish column

Each scheduled finite item in the queue shows an expected-finish value. Infinite items show an infinity indicator, while an item with no scheduled timeline entry has no finish value. You will see the value as a column in the table view of the queue and on the big item view when you open a single item.

Alongside the predicted print end, the staffed versus unstaffed indicator shows whether that time lands inside your working hours. A finish inside working hours is marked staffed; one outside working hours is marked unstaffed.

Expected finish shows when the last scheduled copy should finish printing. The staffed indicator tells you whether someone is expected to be present then; it does not add a later bed-clear or ready-to-ship time to that item.

The printers-page farm overview

Your printers page carries a row of farm-overview cards across the top, giving you the live state of the fleet at a glance. The Finishing before shift end card uses the remaining time of prints that are currently running or paused and compares their predicted end with the time selected on the card.

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 useful question near the end of the day: how many currently active prints should finish before the selected time?

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.

The card counts currently printing or paused printers whose remaining print time ends before the selected clock. It does not include queued work or add bed-clear turnaround, so read it as an active-print completion count rather than a ready-to-ship forecast.

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 currently simulated work 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: 02/09/2026