Print your cards yourself, on any card printer you already own or one we supply. Or leave the printing to us: we print your order within two working days and courier it to you, tracked, so the cards arrive quickly without a printer on site.
Owning a card printer is worth it at some volumes and a nuisance at others. Print on a printer you already have, on one we supply, or have us print the cards at our site and ship them to you. All three use the same approved designs and the same cardholder records, and you can mix them.
The print agent drives the card printer in your own card room, batch runs, or one card at the counter while somebody waits, with encoding as part of the job. Most of this page is about doing that well. A subscription from $80 a month covers it, with no charge per card: what it costs.
No printer yet? We can supply the whole system: the card printer, the software that runs it, and the ribbons and card stock it uses. One supplier for all of it, quoted for your volumes. Ask for a quote.
Approve a quoted order in the portal and we print it in our card room, from your locked template, and courier it to you with tracking. No printer, ribbons, spoilage or maintenance to own. Suited to seasonal volumes, sites without a card room, and overflow when yours is at capacity. How an order runs, and what it costs.
Enrolment produces cards in batches; a lost card produces one, now. Both go through the same issuance path, so a counter reprint is registered and verifiable in exactly the way a bulk run is.
A small print agent runs on the PC beside the printer and drives it through the manufacturer's own driver, which is what owns colour management, panel sequencing, dual-sided flipping and the encoder. The Zebra ZXP Series 7 is the most deeply integrated; see the table below.
Cards are printed through the manufacturer's own Windows or CUPS driver rather than by writing raw bytes to a port. That driver owns colour management, panel sequencing, dual-sided flipping and the encoder, so the platform can send work to any card printer that has a driver installed and a print queue on the machine.
These are the brands we see most often in New Zealand and Australian card rooms:
| Brand | Ranges commonly seen here | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Zebra | ZXP Series 1, 3, 7 and 9; ZC100, ZC300, ZC350 | Fully integrated |
| Evolis | Primacy 2, Zenius, Agilia, Avansia, Badgy | Prints via driver |
| Entrust (formerly Datacard) | Sigma DS2 and DS3, CD800, SD260, SD360, CE870 | Prints via driver |
| HID Fargo | DTC1250e, DTC4250e, DTC5500LMX, HDP5000, HDP6600 | Prints via driver |
| Magicard | 300, 600, Pronto100, Ultima, Rio Pro | Prints via driver |
| Matica | XID 8300, XID 9300, Espresso II | Prints via driver |
| IDP | Smart-31, Smart-51, Smart-71 | Prints via driver |
| Nisca | PR-C101, PR-C201 | Prints via driver |
“Fully integrated” means more than printing. On the Zebra ZXP Series 7 the agent also reads printer status, tracks ribbon and card stock, handles magnetic stripe encoding as part of the print job, and manages the standby behaviour that otherwise leaves a Windows queue stuck offline. On other makes, cards print through the driver and the queue reports online or offline; consumables telemetry and in-line encoding depend on what that manufacturer's driver and utilities expose.
Which is a long way of saying: tell us what you already own before you budget for a replacement. We will confirm exactly what your model does and does not support during commissioning, rather than leaving you to find out afterwards. If your printer is not on this list, it is worth asking, the list is what is common, not what is possible.
Running out of ribbon halfway through enrolment week is an operational failure, not a surprise. The platform tracks what the printer reports and warns before a run is released that cannot finish.
Live counts from the printer, with warnings when a queued run would exhaust what is loaded.
Cards since last clean, tracked per printer, so maintenance happens on schedule rather than after a fault.
Online, offline or asleep, reported per printer with the reason, so the print room is not guessing.
A school issuing four hundred cards in February, a satellite site with no card room, a printer that has failed in the middle of enrolment week: in each case the cards can be produced here instead, from the same cardholder records and the same approved template, and couriered to you. We started as a card bureau, so this is the oldest part of the business. The difference now is that it runs inside the platform rather than out of an inbox full of spreadsheets.
$12.50 to $15.00 a card, by the size of the order, before GST and delivery, with no platform fee on the bureau-only plan. Printed within two working days, and a digital ID is included with every card. See the price table.
No capital purchase, no service contract, no cleaning schedule, and no machine sitting idle for eleven months of the year because your issuance is seasonal.
We buy the consumables, and a card spoiled on our printer is our cost rather than a line on your invoice. You pay for cards produced and delivered.
Photographs are screened against the ICAO rules when they are uploaded, so an unusable shot is rejected before a card is printed on it, not after the parcel arrives.
Most organisations end up doing both, and the platform is built for that: the intake batch is ordered in, the walk-up replacement is printed at the counter, and both are the same kind of record afterwards.
The unglamorous half of a bureau service is freight and invoicing. Both are set per organisation and visible before you order, rather than arriving as a surprise on a statement.
Tracked courier, one to three working days. Overnight courier, next working day to the main centres. Or collection from us. Delivery is charged once per parcel, at the dearest service any order in it asked for, so letting routine reprints gather for a few days saves freight.
Your sites sit in a pick list, so a satellite campus's cards go to the satellite campus. The address is frozen onto the order when you submit it, which means editing an address later never redirects a parcel already on its way.
One consolidated invoice a month for everything not yet invoiced, or one invoice per parcel as it is dispatched, whichever suits your finance team. Set once per organisation. There is no card payment or checkout in the portal.
Printed within two working days. An order of up to 999 cards leaves our card room within two working days of you submitting it. Delivery is then the courier's part, above: one to three working days, or overnight to the main centres. Larger runs are given a date with their quote, work tied to a real deadline, an intake or a graduation, is agreed before we start, and rush orders go to the front of the print room.
Access control encoding stays on your site. If your cards open doors, the keys for your access control system live on your own encoding station and are never held in the portal, deliberately. So cards arrive printed and magnetically encoded, and are encoded for the doors at your counter with the encoder agent, which takes a scan per card. Tell us what your doors read and we will say plainly which part we can do and which part stays with you.
On the bureau-only plan, where there is no platform fee, a card we print and deliver costs between $12.50 and $15.00 depending on the size of the order, in New Zealand dollars before GST. Every card includes a digital ID for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. Orders of 1,000 or more are quoted, and delivery is charged per parcel. The full price table is on the pricing page.
There are two ways. We can supply a card printer, the system and the supplies it needs, so you print your own cards. Or order printed cards from us: you approve a quoted order in the portal, we print it from your locked template in our own card room within two working days, and it is couriered to you with tracking: one to three working days on the standard service, or next working day to the main centres on the overnight service. Plenty of organisations mix the two: bulk runs ordered in, walk-up replacements printed at their own counter.
An order of up to 999 cards is printed and dispatched within two working days of you submitting it. Delivery then takes one to three working days by tracked courier, or the next working day to the main centres by overnight courier. Larger runs are given a date with their quote, and rush orders go to the front of the print room.
Yes. Delivery is charged per parcel though, so one card carries the same freight as fifty, which is why most sites let routine reprints gather for a few days and send them together. A genuinely urgent single card is usually faster printed at your own counter, if you have a printer.
Yes. Your delivery addresses are saved in the portal and each order picks its own, so a satellite site's cards go to the satellite site. Parcels to two addresses are two parcels and carry two delivery charges.
On account. Either one consolidated invoice a month covering everything not yet invoiced, or one invoice per parcel as it is dispatched, whichever suits your finance team. It is set once per organisation, and there is no card payment or checkout in the portal.
Magnetic stripes, yes, as part of the print. Contactless encoding for your access control system is done at your own station with the encoder agent, because the keys for that system stay on your machine and are never held in the portal. Cards arrive printed and magnetically encoded, ready for that scan.
It is reprinted before the parcel leaves and you are not charged for it, because you pay for cards produced and delivered. Nothing is registered against the cardholder until the printer reports the card printed, so the card in your records is the card in your hand.
Usually not. Cards print through the manufacturer's own Windows or CUPS driver, so any card printer with a driver installed can receive work, Zebra, Evolis, Entrust (Datacard), HID Fargo, Magicard, Matica, IDP and Nisca are all common here. The Zebra ZXP Series 7 is the most deeply integrated, adding consumables tracking, in-line encoding and standby handling. Tell us what you own before you budget for a replacement.
Any card printer with a Windows or CUPS driver can be printed to, which covers Zebra, Evolis, Entrust (formerly Datacard), HID Fargo, Magicard, Matica, IDP and Nisca. The Zebra ZXP Series 7 is fully integrated, meaning the agent also reads printer status, tracks ribbon and card stock, and encodes magnetic stripes as part of the print job. We confirm exactly what your model supports during commissioning.
Yes, as part of the same print job, with coercivity matched to your card stock. Cards that require encoding fail rather than printing unencoded, so a card never leaves the print room half-finished.
The job is reported failed and requeued automatically. Faults that need a person, out of cards, out of ribbon, a jam, a cover open, are parked and reported rather than retried endlessly.
Yes. Each print machine runs its own agent with its own credential, so a multi-campus institution can produce cards locally while managing everything centrally.
Tell us how you issue cards today and we will show you what this looks like for your institution. No obligation, and no sales script.