The finance staff sits at headquarters; the orders sit at the branch. Every evening, a branch clerk photographs the sales slips and sends them over WeChat, and the headquarters accountant copies them into the system one by one, phone in hand. This isn’t a joke — it’s daily reality for many owners of two stores. If you want the branch to print orders straight from the headquarters ERP, or the headquarters to pre-print labels for the branch, only one thing stands in the way: a printer only recognizes computers on the same local network. Two stores, two networks — to the printer, the other side simply doesn’t exist.
This article lays out three approaches to cross-site printing, so you can see which one fits your situation. One disclosure up front: we make Yuxinan, a multi-site networking product, so we have a vested interest — which is why, wherever our own product is involved, we give you methods you can test yourself rather than empty promises.
First, understand why your printer can’t leave the store
A printer in the office can be discovered by everyone’s computers thanks to local network broadcast — and that broadcast stops at the door. Two stores sit behind two broadband connections and two routers, so the branch computers simply can’t “see” the headquarters printer. The real question is therefore how to turn two networks into one; how advanced the printer itself is barely matters.
But first, let’s rule out the easiest case: if your ERP is already web-based or cloud-based, and the branch can log in through a browser and create orders, then you don’t need to install anything — the branch connects to its own printer and prints directly, and you can skip the rest of this article. The three approaches below are for stores where “the ERP runs on the headquarters intranet” or where you “genuinely want both locations to share the same printer’s output.”
Option 1: Photograph and send via WeChat (what most stores do today)
Zero cost, but do the full math: the clerk photographs, the accountant transcribes — a few minutes per order, and a few dozen orders a day adds up to half a person’s workday. Manual transcription also introduces errors, and errors mean reconciliation. For a store with low volume — two or three orders a day — this is fine; once volume picks up, you’re filling a network gap with human labor.
Option 2: Cloud printing (a vendor app, or a print cloud box for around RMB 100)
Two forms: first, the remote printing app advertised on the brochure when you buy the printer; second, a standalone “print cloud box” plugged into a USB printer to turn it into a cloud printer that accepts remote jobs. These work well for parents printing homework, or for the occasional document. Be cautious about using them for business documents: you have to install the vendor’s own app or driver, your order system (ERP/inventory software) usually won’t recognize this channel, and remote printing of three-part dot-matrix forms easily scrambles the layout. If you really want to try it, run a small batch of your own documents through it for a few days first.
Option 3: Networking — turn the printer into “an ordinary printer both sides can see”
This solves the problem at its root. Put one networking device at each site; once the two store networks merge into a single logical large LAN, the headquarters printer is simply “a network printer on the network” as far as the branch is concerned: add a printer on the branch computer, enter the printer’s internal IP, install the driver — done. It’s exactly like adding a printer in the same office. ERP, inventory software, and Word can all print directly, with no software changes.
Depending on your printer, there are three ways to connect it:
| Your printer’s situation | How to connect it | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Has an Ethernet port or Wi-Fi built in (network printer) | Easiest. Assign it a fixed IP (set up a DHCP reservation in the router) and computers on both sides can add it directly | RMB 0 — use your existing equipment as is |
| An older printer with only a USB port | Share it from an always-on computer or NAS at headquarters; after networking, both sides can reach that shared machine | RMB 0 — just don’t shut down the sharing computer |
| A high-volume store (label printers or dot-matrix receipt printers running nonstop) | Honestly, in this case it’s smoother to give each store its own printer; networking handles letting both sides reach the headquarters ERP, while each store prints on its own | The cost of extra printers, but it saves you the back-and-forth |
Three things owners worry about most
Is cross-store printing slow? Print data is tiny — a page of an order is a few KB to a few hundred KB — so even over the cloud relay (2 Mbps on the free plan) it transfers in seconds. What actually consumes bandwidth is video and large file transfers; we worked through that math in Will networking affect my internet speed?, and the conclusion is that everyday browsing and point-of-sale operations aren’t affected at all.
What if the internet goes down? Local printing (a branch computer printing to a branch printer) doesn’t go through the network, so it works whether or not you’re online. Only cross-store printing uses the tunnel, and the tunnel reconnects itself within seconds of a drop; if it can’t reconnect, it automatically switches to the cloud relay — see our article on stability for how that works.
Is it secure? Could someone see our order data? The networking channel is encrypted end to end, and no scanable entry point is exposed to the public internet (no port forwarding), so order data travels as ciphertext. For the fuller security picture, see our article on NAS/ERP security.
Trying it yourself beats reading ten articles
The Yuxinan free trial is RMB 0 forever and activates the moment you register, with an allowance of 2 endpoints (hardware included) — exactly “one at headquarters plus one at the branch.” Once it’s installed, one action is enough: on the branch computer, add a printer, enter the headquarters printer’s internal IP, and print a test page. If paper comes out of the machine at headquarters, you’re done. The line between the free and paid plans is set out in this article, the cost math for multiple stores is in the cost breakdown for chain-store networking, and the six pricing tiers are published on our website year-round.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: My printer is an old USB model. Do I need to buy a new one?
A: No. Just share it from an always-on computer at headquarters — Windows has built-in printer sharing, and after networking the branch can add it as usual. The only requirement is that the computer stays on after hours.
Q: If the branch prints documents from the headquarters ERP, do we need to change any ERP settings?
A: No. The ERP only cares which printers are installed on the computer; once the branch computer has that network printer installed, selecting it in the ERP is just like selecting a local printer.
Q: Will printing from both sides at once cause conflicts?
A: No. The printer queues jobs on its own — whichever job arrives first prints first, just like several people in an office sharing one printer.
Q: If we remove the networking later, will it affect printing?
A: Local use is unchanged; the branch simply can no longer see the headquarters printer. Networking doesn’t touch any of your existing equipment or settings.
Prices and bandwidth for the Yuxinan free and paid plans are subject to the pages published on its official website as of October 2026.
