How Chicago Printworks cut checkout time by 85% with Zoho POS

Key results:

• Checkout Time 85%
• Daily Time saved2+ hours
• Downtime Post - Live0
• Manual Re-EntryEliminated

The company

Chicago Printworks was founded in 2009 with a clear and personal mission: to give Chicago's arts and entertainment community access to printing services that were fast, affordable, and actually felt human. The founders, arts promoters themselves, were tired of seeing small and mid-sized organizations get lost in the impersonal workflows of large online print companies. They built Printworks to fill that gap.

Operating from its storefront at Chicago's West Side, Printworks has grown into one of the city's most trusted print shops, offering everything from business cards, booklets, brochures, and posters to banners, menus, vinyl wall graphics, and street marketing services like wheat-paste postering and door hanger distribution. Nearly 500 five-star Google reviews speak to the loyalty they've earned.

The business is guided by a simple principle: Print local, print easier, print better. And with a team of seven, every order—whether a stack of flyers for a neighborhood artist or a full signage package for a corporate client—receives the same hands-on attention from start to finish. Then the pandemic hit. Nearly all of Printworks' customers worked in live entertainment—and overnight, that world went dark. Rather than wait it out, owner Micah Taylor made a decisive pivot: from B2B-only to a mixed business-to-consumer model. In the last two years, Printworks opened its retail walk-in component, bringing direct customer interaction to the forefront and fundamentally changing what the business needed from its technology.

"We started Printworks to fill a gap—to serve each customer, regardless of size, with the same level of care throughout the complicated process of professional printing." 

About the company

Chicago Printworks was founded in 2009 with a clear and personal mission: to give Chicago's arts and entertainment community access to printing services that were fast, affordable, and actually felt human. The founders, arts promoters themselves, were tired of seeing small and mid-sized organizations get lost in the impersonal workflows of large online print companies. They built Printworks to fill that gap.

Operating from its storefront at Chicago's West Side, Printworks has grown into one of the city's most trusted print shops, offering everything from business cards, booklets, brochures, and posters to banners, menus, vinyl wall graphics, and street marketing services like wheat-paste postering and door hanger distribution. Nearly 500 five-star Google reviews speak to the loyalty they've earned. The business is guided by a simple principle: Print local, print easier, print better. And with a team of seven, every order—whether a stack of flyers for a neighborhood artist or a full signage package for a corporate client—receives the same hands-on attention from start to finish.

Then the pandemic hit. Nearly all of Printworks' customers worked in live entertainment—and overnight, that world went dark. Rather than wait it out, owner Micah Taylor made a decisive pivot: from B2B-only to a mixed business-to-consumer model. In the last two years, Printworks opened its retail walk-in component, bringing direct customer interaction to the forefront and fundamentally changing what the business needed from its technology.

The challenge

Chicago Printworks outgrew its fragmented stack of disconnected tools—a basic contact manager, separate accounting software, and a standalone payment terminal with no integration between them. As the retail walk-in side of the business grew, they wanted a way to accept payments at the counter, in person, that connected directly to the invoicing system without any manual effort.

Before Zoho POS, every walk-in payment was a slow, manual process. Staff would need to pull up a customer's order in one system, create or locate the invoice in another, and then process the transaction separately—a workflow that routinely took 15 to 20 minutes per transaction. For a shop processing around 30 invoices a day, with roughly 25% of those handled in person, this added up to significant lost time, every single day. Here are the significant challenges the company faced.

No terminal connected to the invoicing system

Walk-in customers who preferred to pay on pickup—or who wanted to inspect their print order before paying—had no clean way to do so. The standalone payment terminal was not integrated, so staff had to manually reconcile every in-person transaction after the fact.

Multiple payment scenarios with no unified flow

Some customers paid cash. Some paid by card. Some paid in advance online; others wanted to settle on collection. There was no single system that could handle all of these within one workflow.

Manual reconciliation every day

Every in-person payment required cross-referencing against Books manually. For an owner who also wanted a quick audit capability (checking that payment records in the POS matched what was in Books) this meant digging through records across two separate systems.

Customers asking for modern payment options

Walk-in customers were asking to pay by credit card and Apple Pay. Without a connected, modern POS terminal, Printworks couldn't offer this cleanly.

The challenges added up to one clear requirement: a fully integrated system where CRM, accounting, payments, and in-person point-of-sale all spoke the same language in real time. Any disconnected solution would mean double-entry, reconciliation headaches, and more complexity for the team. Integration was non-negotiable.

Why Zoho

When Taylor connected with Hourless, a Zoho Advanced Partner based in Illinois, the brief was clear: Whatever technology solution was chosen, it had to work as a connected system, not a collection of independent tools.

Zoho stood out because of its connected ecosystem. With CRM, accounting, marketing, forms, automation, and communication working together, the business could manage operations from a single platform. Zoho POS, integrated smoothly with Printworks' existing Zoho setup and took charge of the retail operations side of the business.

Compared to niche print-industry tools like ShopVOX or ShopWorks OnSite, Zoho offered greater flexibility, scalability, and customization. The timing was also notable. Zoho POS had recently launched in the US at the time, and Printworks became one of the first businesses in the country—and the first in Illinois—to go live with it.

The solution

In 2025, Hourless came on board and helped Chicago Printworks build the entire Zoho ecosystem in a single project—Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Zoho Flow, Zoho POS, and all supporting apps implemented together as one unified solution.

Hardware setup

Zoho POS was deployed with the PAX A35 Android PIN pad, connected through the Everyware payment gateway. This combination gives the front-of-house team a modern, reliable countertop terminal that supports:

• Credit and debit card payments (chip, swipe, tap)
• Apple Pay and other contactless payment methods
• Cash transactions with digital recording
• Tap-to-pay for fast, frictionless checkout

How it works day to day

The workflow at Printworks is built around the print order. Here is how a typical in-person transaction flows through Zoho POS:

• A customer's print order is created as a print order in Zoho CRM, with custom fields specific to the printing workflow.
• When the order is ready, an invoice is automatically generated in Zoho Books through a custom Zoho Flow automation built by Hourless.
• All invoices from Zoho Books are mirrored automatically into Zoho POS.
• When the customer arrives to pick up their order, front-of-house staff can open the mirrored invoice directly in Zoho POS—no searching, no re-entry.
• The customer pays by card, Apple Pay, or cash. The transaction is processed through the PAX A35 via Everyware.
• The invoice in Zoho Books is marked as paid automatically. Reconciliation is instant.

The entire transaction now takes approximately three minutes. Before Zoho POS, the same process took 15 to 20 minutes.

Key Zoho POS features used

Invoice mirroring from Zoho Books:

Every invoice created in Books appears automatically in POS. Staff never need to manually enter order details at the counter; the information is already there, accurate, and ready to process.

Multiple payment methods in one terminal:

Credit card, debit, Apple Pay, tap-to-pay, and cash are all handled within the same workflow on the PAX A35. Customers get the flexibility they want; staff never have to leave the system to complete a transaction.

Real-time reconciliation:

The moment a payment is completed in POS, the corresponding invoice in Books is marked paid. No end-of-day manual matching, no separate reconciliation step.

Payment reports as an audit tool:

Taylor uses POS payment reports as a quick secondary check against Zoho Books, providing confidence in the numbers without needing to live inside the system.

Flexible payment timing:

Customers can pay in advance, on pickup, or after inspecting their finished order. The invoice stays open until the customer is ready—no workarounds needed.

Simple enough for everyone:

All seven staff members were trained without a formal program. The interface is intuitive enough that the team picked it up through use.

Benefits and ROI

Checkout time: From 15–20 minutes to 3 minutes

The single most immediate and measurable impact was the time saved at checkout. Every in-person transaction that previously required manual work across multiple systems now completes in about three minutes at the POS terminal.

Over two hours saved per day in payment processing

Taylor estimates the time saving at a minimum of two hours per day. That is time that previously went into manual transaction processing, now freed up for customer service, production, and business development.

Zero downtime since go-live

Despite being an early adopter on a new platform, Printworks has had no operational disruptions from the POS system since the initial setup was completed.

All staff trained with no formal training program

The entire team uses Zoho POS daily. The learning curve was low enough that no structured training was needed—staff picked it up as they used it.

Modern payment options now available

Customers can now pay by credit card, Apple Pay, and tap-to-pay in person—options they had been requesting but were not previously available.

Real-time reconciliation with zero manual effort

In-person payments automatically update the corresponding invoice in Zoho Books. The daily reconciliation task that once required manual cross-referencing no longer exists.

Owner audit confidence

Taylor noted that he can quickly check POS payment reports against Books at any time for a secondary audit, without needing to spend significant time in the POS system itself. The integration does the heavy lifting.