What is a card printing bureau?
The ID Card Centre bureau is a service that we offer to manage the printing and encoding of ID cards, access control cards, technology cards and name badges on behalf of companies, organisations and individuals. There are many reasons for needing to use a bureau service such as not owning the correct printing and encoding equipment or not having the time or man power to handle the job in house.
There is no job too big or small for the bureau to cope with – we regularly handle print jobs of single cards up to thousands of cards.
In fact we’ve recently converted the loft space of our offices to accommodate a new bureau so that we can manage larger jobs, and more of them, with even quicker turnaround times.
What types of cards can you print and encode in the bureau?
If it can be printed on a plastic card then we can do it. Depending on the customer’s needs we either print the full card design, including any personalisation or we print part of the card, such as a full colour background design, so that the personalisation can be done as needed by the customer.
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Photo ID Cards
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ID Cards
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Technology cards including MIFARE®, HID, Paxton, PAC, TDSi and Cotag
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Access Control Cards
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Student ID Cards
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Smart Cards
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Bus Passes
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Event Passes
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Security Access Cards
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Name Badges
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Proximity Cards
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Staff ID Cards
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Door Entry Cards
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Physical Access Cards
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Visitor Cards
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Loyalty Cards
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Reward Cards
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Training & Qualification Cards
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Name Tags
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Club Membership Cards
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Discount Cards
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Advertising & Promotional Cards
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Pricing & Labelling Cards
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Security Cards
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ICE (In Case of Emergency) Cards and Tags
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Gym Cards
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Key Fobs
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Our services include:
- Artwork and design set up
- Full monochrome or colour card printing
- Base design printing – leaving space for personalisation in house
- Personalised cards – we print the cardholders details on the cards for you
- Print on Demand service – we hold your card design and print cards off as and when you need them – for example as new staff or members join your orginisation
- Barcode printing
- Card encoding – magnetic strip, smart chip and contactless
- Chip serial number capture
Card Types
Whether you need a basic white card or a smart technology card we have a full range to suit every need. Including:
- Plain PVC – in pure white or a range of colours including fluorescent and metallic
- Keyfob style – in 2Up (snaps into 2 smaller cards) or 3Up (snaps into 3 smaller cards) designs
- Access Control
- Technology cards
- Biodegradable cards
- Rewrite cards
How long does it take?
It depends on the specific print job but many simple orders can be turned around the same day. Very large or complex orders would take longer but generally for litho printed cards you should allow 14-21 working days (although we can also expedite these if required for an additional charge).
How do I go about ordering bureau cards?
- We’ll need to know how many cards you would like and how quickly you need them.
- Then give us as much information as possible about the type of card you’re trying to produce, what and how long it will be used for, and what you would like to be printed on the card.
- Also let us know about any encoding or security features required, such as chip encoding, mag stripe encoding or barcodes and scratch off panels.
- Once we have the information needed we will send you a quotation over, and as soon as this has been approved we’ll start designing your cards.
- You will always be sent an artwork proof of the card design to sign off before we will commence any print job.
- If we are also going to be printing individual’s data on your card then we’ll need this to be emailed to us in a spreadsheet - for a downloadable template please click here.
- If photos are also going on the cards then please either email them in a Zip file or send via a large file transfer service such as We Transfer or Mail Big File.
- As soon as we have all of your data and an approved card design we will print your cards, securely package them for transit and get them shipped out to you.
For more information on designing an ID card, the information we need and the format we need it in, please see here.
For full details on the different print types and prices please visit our ID Card Printing Bureau page.
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