Overs and unders

Overs and unders are the small variance a decorated-goods run ships above or below the ordered quantity — a 500-piece order might arrive at 512 or at 488, and that gap is considered normal, not an error. The allowance traditionally runs up to 10% on screen-printed jobs and somewhat less, often 3-5%, on embroidery or smaller runs, though the exact percentage should be spelled out in a shop's terms before an order is placed.

This exists because decoration is a physical process with real spoilage — a print run loses pieces to misregistration, a stray ink smear, or a garment that arrived from the mill with a flaw nobody caught until after printing. A brewery ordering exactly 300 event shirts should expect an invoice for whatever actually shipped, whether that's 294 or 307, not a guaranteed 300 with reprints on the house.

For anything where the count is truly fixed — 150 seats at a gala, 40 crew members — order a buffer above the hard number, since a shop can't promise zero variance and won't eat the cost of a shortfall on an exact-count job. Get the overs-and-unders percentage in writing on the quote, not assumed.

The recurring dispute: a buyer expects to be billed for exactly the number ordered and is surprised by an invoice reflecting 8% overs. That's not a billing error — it's the industry standard, and it should have been disclosed on the estimate, but it isn't padding or upselling.