Moving to a cloud ERP like Acumatica or MYOB changes how your whole company works. Users log in from a browser, remote staff see the same live data as head office, and nobody babysits a server room anymore. But there is one everyday task where many cloud ERP projects quietly stumble: printing.
Pick tickets, packing slips, shipping labels, carton and pallet labels, bin labels, lot and serial labels. These documents still need to come out of a physical printer, often in a warehouse far from the office. This post explains why printing is the weak spot of cloud ERP, and how Acumatica or MYOB cloud print with Asgard Cloud Print closes the gap.
Why cloud ERP is efficient in the first place
The efficiency gains of a cloud ERP are real and well known:
- Lower upfront costs: no servers to buy or install software on.
- Access from anywhere: any device with a browser and an internet connection can reach Acumatica or MYOB.
- Less IT overhead: backups, updates and upgrades are handled for you.
- Scalability: add users, companies and locations without building new infrastructure.
Every one of these benefits assumes the work lives in the browser. Printing doesn’t. It happens at a device on your local network, next to a packing station or a receiving dock.
Why printing is the weak spot of cloud ERP
The browser is not a print server
When Acumatica or MYOB runs in the browser, the default way to print is the browser’s print dialog. That works for the occasional invoice. It does not work for a warehouse printing hundreds of labels a shift. Every print becomes a preview, a dialog, a printer selection and a click. Page scaling and margins shift, and barcodes get resized until scanners can’t read them.
Label printers speak their own languages
Industrial label printers from Zebra, Honeywell, SATO, TSC, cab and others work best when they receive their native language, such as ZPL, DPL, IPL, Fingerprint, SBPL, TSPL, cab JScript or ESC/Label. A browser sends a rendered page, not native commands. That means slower printing, fuzzy barcodes and labels that don’t line up with the stock.
Remote warehouses and sites
Your ERP is in the cloud, but your printers are behind firewalls in buildings across town or across the country. Getting a document from a cloud server to a specific printer at a specific site usually takes VPNs, port forwarding or a workstation that has to stay logged in. Each workaround adds another way for things to break.
People become the print spooler
When printing is awkward, people build workarounds: emailing PDFs to a colleague near the printer, batching labels at the end of the day, or keeping a spreadsheet next to the ERP. That’s the manual work cloud ERP was supposed to remove.
How Asgard Cloud Print solves Acumatica or MYOB cloud printing
Asgard Cloud Print is a hosted printing service built for Acumatica or MYOB, and it’s included with Asgard Labels. Asgard Alliance is an Acumatica ISV partner, and Asgard Labels is the only Acumatica-native label solution, certified and listed on the Acumatica Marketplace.
Print jobs reach the printer almost instantly
Asgard Cloud Print is event-driven and uses sockets. When a user clicks print in Acumatica or MYOB, the job is pushed to the printer right away. The system doesn’t wait for a polling cycle, and no dialog pops up. For a busy shipping station, those seconds add up to real throughput.
Any printer your operating system knows
If a printer is installed on your computer, it works. That covers industrial and desktop label printers (Zebra, Honeywell/Intermec/Datamax, SATO, TSC, cab, Epson ColorWorks) as well as office laser and inkjet printers (HP, Canon, Epson, Brother, Xerox and more). You don’t need special drivers on the Acumatica or MYOB side.
Native languages for label printers, canvas output for everything else
For label printers, Asgard Labels produces native printer languages: ZPL, DPL, IPL, Fingerprint, SBPL, TSPL, cab JScript and ESC/Label. Barcodes and 2D barcodes stay sharp, and labels print at the printer’s full speed. For regular office printers, it uses canvas output: PDF, PCL, PostScript or image. RAW printing is supported too.
Print anywhere: other sites, other warehouses
Because Asgard Cloud Print is hosted, a user in head office can print a pallet label at a warehouse in another city just as easily as at the printer down the hall. Receiving, put-away and transfer labels come out where the work happens. You don’t need a VPN or port forwarding.
Secure by design
Asgard Cloud Print encrypts everything. It uses the PrintNode service for delivery, doesn’t collect data it doesn’t need, and never shares your information.
What efficient cloud printing looks like day to day
With Asgard Labels and Asgard Cloud Print, you can print Acumatica or MYOB labels and barcodes from any Acumatica screen with one click and no coding. Typical workflows include:
- Shipping: carton and pallet labels with your logo, addresses and GS1-128/SSCC barcodes, printed at the packing station as the shipment is confirmed.
- Receiving and put-away: labels printed at the dock as goods arrive, then transfer labels as stock moves.
- Warehouse setup: inventory, bin and location labels printed in bulk for a new site.
- Manufacturing and compliance: lot, serial and expiration labels with 2D barcodes such as GS1 DataMatrix and QR codes.
- Documents: packing slips and other documents with 2D barcodes, sent to office printers.
Print as many labels as you need to any printer. Your cloud ERP stays in the browser, and the output lands where your team needs it.
Checklist: is printing slowing down your cloud ERP?
- Do users go through a browser print dialog for every label?
- Are barcodes sometimes unreadable because of scaling?
- Do remote sites depend on someone emailing them PDFs?
- Do you need a VPN or an always-on workstation just to print?
- Are labels batched at the end of the day because printing is slow?
If you answered yes to any of these, printing is costing you some of the efficiency you moved to the cloud for.
Make printing as cloud-ready as your ERP
Our founder, Stéphane Bélanger, has worked with ERP since 1993 and with Acumatica since 2016. He was named Acumatica Developer of the Year in 2022 and has been an Acumatica MVP for several years. We built Asgard Labels and Asgard Cloud Print so printing would stop being the weak link in cloud ERP. Learn more about Asgard Cloud Print, explore Asgard Labels, or contact us to see Acumatica or MYOB cloud print in action.
