How to Automate Cyrious

Control prices a sign by the square foot, not by the piece

Cyrious makes Control, the business management system a great many sign, graphics and print companies run on. It covers the whole shop: estimating and pricing, work orders, job tracking, shipping, invoicing, inventory and purchase orders, accounting and reporting.

Sign work does not price like other manufacturing. A job might be a vehicle wrap, a set of channel letters, a wayfinding package for an office fit-out, a monument sign or two hundred yard signs, and the cost of each is a function of area, substrate, machine time and installation rather than a unit price off a list. Control handles that directly, with square foot and area based pricing, cost plus, table based and custom pricing, and a bill of materials underneath the estimate.

That is why shops keep it for decades. The estimate, the work order, the job cost and the invoice are one object rather than four documents that have to be made to agree.

Half a sign job happens outside the shop

The part of the work Control cannot see starts the moment a job leaves the building, and often before it is built at all.

A wall sign needs a permit, and that permit sits in a municipal portal with its own status page and its own idea of how long a review takes. A landlord or a property manager has to approve the design. The sheets of aluminium composite come from a wholesale distributor whose stock and pricing live behind a login. The finished cabinet ships crated on a freight carrier, and somebody has to know it landed before a crew and a lift are booked for Tuesday.

So the estimator, or more often the owner, spends part of every day in other companies' websites. A permit status. A distributor's stock page. A tracking number. A bid board where a school district posted a sign package. Then back into Control to update the job.

Cyrious

Permits watched instead of remembered Every filed application checked on the city's own portal, so an install goes on the calendar the week it clears review.

Estimates priced on this week's cost Substrate and vinyl pricing read from the distributor account a quote depends on, before the margin quietly disappears.

Crates that stopped moving Freight tracking read for every shipped sign, so a crew and a lift are not booked against a delivery still sitting in a terminal.

Statuses and stations already move a job across the floor

Control automates more of the shop than most owners have configured, and it is worth exhausting before adding anything beside it.

Job tracking runs on user-definable statuses and stations, so a job moves from design to print to laminate to install on a board the shop actually recognises, and custom dashboards let each person watch only their own work. The Automation module schedules pop-up reminders and emails estimates, invoices and statements automatically, so a quote nobody answered and a statement nobody sent stop depending on memory. Inventory and purchase orders run across multiple locations with low-level alerts that fire before a job commits material that is not there. Sales and marketing schedules follow-up reminders against the customer record, and there are over two hundred built-in reports plus custom queries for whatever they miss.

Every one of those fires on something Control already knows.

Which is the boundary. Control cannot open a city's permit portal and read that a review moved to approved. It cannot see that a distributor's price on cast vinyl went up last week, or that a crate has been sitting at a freight terminal since Thursday.

An estimate that knows today's sheet price

Give the shop something that can read those sites, and the parts of a sign job that happen outside the building come back inside it.

Permit applications checked each morning on whichever municipal portal they were filed in, so an install that has cleared gets scheduled this week instead of whenever somebody thinks to look. Distributor stock and pricing read for the substrates, vinyl and hardware a quote depends on, so an estimate written against a price list from March is not quietly giving away the margin the job was supposed to make.

Freight tracking for every crated sign, with the shipments that stopped moving at the top, because a crew, a bucket truck and a lane closure are expensive things to rebook. Bid boards and procurement portals watched for sign packages in your area, which is work most shops know they should do and no shop has an afternoon for.

Reviews after an install, gathered from wherever the customer left them, so a bad one is answered the same day.

Anything that goes to a customer or a city is drafted and read by a person before it is sent.

The truck roll is the expensive part

Each of those checks is cheap on its own and ruinous when it is missed, because the cost of being wrong in a sign shop is a crew standing in a car park with the wrong bracket.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the permit portal, the distributor account, the freight carrier or the bid board, reads what is on the screen, and either updates the job in Control or gives you the list.

Nothing has to be integrated first, which matters when the other end is a municipal website with no interface at all. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything customer-facing waits for approval.

The workflows below are already built, and each names what it opens.