Productivity in electronic printer incorporating finishing activities and operating in a job streaming mode are enhanced by utilizing software to calculate and predict the minimum delay corresponding to minimum skip pitches) in successive jobs requiring finishing activities such as binding and stapling. Printing and collating of sets of original scanned documents are controlled so that collated sets are successively presented by the printer to the finisher nearly coincident with conclusion of the finishing activity being accomplished for a current job. Additional software innovations allow job scheduling for jobs involving complex pitch time delays created by scanning simplex and duplex documents returned in random order. For this case optimum delay time is the cumulative finishing hardware delays as well as imaging/paper path delays. Still another feature is a predictive algorithym which is used to increase reliability of printer components by cycling down the printer between jobs in situations where the finishing activity for a current job requires an extraordinarily long time to complete compared with the cycle down/cycle up time of the printer.