Printers & printing setup

Biller can now print automatically -- both the customer receipt and the kitchen order ticket (KOT) -- to a thermal printer over your outlet's WiFi/LAN network, with no manual "tap Print" step needed. This is separate from (and in addition to) the browser print flow covered in Printing your bills.

What you need

A thermal printer with a network (Ethernet or WiFi) interface -- usually labelled "LAN printing" or "network printer" in its manual. Most ESC/POS-compatible 58mm/80mm thermal printers support this.
The printer and the device running Biller must be on the same local network. A printer reachable only from your home WiFi won't receive print jobs sent from your restaurant's network, and vice versa. Cloud-hosted outlet: Biller's hosted server is NOT on your outlet's network, so it needs the Biller Print Agent bridge instead -- see Install the printer companion for a one-click Windows/macOS/Linux install (no terminal needed), or the "Print from the cloud" section of Printing your bills for the manual path.
The printer's IP address. Most network thermal printers show this on a self-test printout (usually printed by holding the feed button while powering on) or in a small companion configuration app from the printer's manufacturer.

Adding a network printer

Open Admin -> Printers.
Tap Add printer.
Enter a name (e.g. "Kitchen printer", "Front counter") so you can tell printers apart later.
Choose Network (WiFi/LAN) as the connection type.
Enter the printer's IP address. Leave the port as 9100 unless your printer's documentation says otherwise -- 9100 is the standard raw print port almost every network thermal printer listens on.
Choose the paper width your printer is loaded with -- 80mm or 58mm.
Choose a role:
- Receipt -- this printer prints the customer bill automatically when a bill is marked Complete.
- Kitchen -- this printer prints a kitchen order ticket (KOT) automatically whenever an order is sent to the kitchen.
- Both -- this one printer handles both.
For a Kitchen/Both printer, optionally choose which menu categories it's a station for (see "Multi-printer kitchen routing" below).
Choose whether THIS printer auto-prints (see "Auto-print on/off" below), then tap Save.

Auto-print on/off -- set per printer

Auto-print is a setting on each individual printer, not one outlet-wide switch. Every printer's add/edit form has a toggle for its own role's trigger, on by default (today's behavior, unchanged):

A Receipt/Both printer -- "Automatically print the receipt here when a bill completes."
A Kitchen/Both printer -- "Automatically print a KOT here when sent to the kitchen." A Both printer shows both toggles and they work independently -- you can auto-print its KOT but leave its receipt manual-only, or vice versa.

Turn a printer's toggle off if your team prefers to trigger THAT printer manually instead -- useful if it's shared/slow, or you only want it firing for some orders, without affecting any other printer. Turning a toggle off never removes the manual print button below; it only stops that one printer's AUTOMATIC print. (Upgrading from an older version of Biller? Every existing printer keeps auto-printing exactly as it did before -- nothing changes until you open a printer's edit form and flip its toggle yourself.)

Manual "Print to kitchen" and "Print receipt"

Two manual print actions live in the billing screen's overflow menu (the ⋮ button next to a bill):

Print to kitchen -- shown whenever the outlet has at least one enabled Kitchen/Both printer, regardless of any printer's own auto-print toggle. It reprints the bill's current kitchen order -- handy both when auto-print is off and as a reprint if a ticket got lost or jammed. Also available in the same overflow menu on the Waiter screen, so front-of-house staff can trigger a reprint without needing billing-board access.
Print receipt -- shown once a bill is Completed and at least one enabled Receipt/Both printer exists. If more than one receipt printer is set up, a picker lets you choose which one to print to; with just one, it prints straight through.

Multi-printer kitchen routing (categories/stations)

If your kitchen has multiple stations (e.g. a tandoor, a bar, a dessert counter), you can set up one Kitchen/Both printer per station and assign each printer the menu categories it should handle:

A printer with categories assigned only prints items from those categories -- e.g. the "Bar" printer assigned the Bar category never prints a tandoor item.
A printer with no categories assigned is the catch-all/default station -- it prints whatever no other station claims.
If an item's category matches no station printer AND there's no catch-all configured, Biller sends that item to every enabled kitchen printer rather than risk the kitchen missing it -- better a duplicate ticket than a lost order.

With a single kitchen printer (the common case) this is a non-issue: leave its categories empty and it keeps behaving exactly as before, printing every item.

Test-printing and checking status

Once a printer is added, use Test print to send a short confirmation printout -- this is the fastest way to confirm the IP address, port, and network reachability are all correct before relying on it during service. Check status does a quick reachability check without printing anything, handy for spotting a printer that's been unplugged or lost its WiFi connection before it causes a missed KOT. On a cloud-hosted outlet with the Biller Print Agent connected (see "What you need" above), the status check routes through the agent the same way an actual print job does, so it reports the printer's real reachability on your outlet's own network -- not whether Biller's hosted server can reach it directly (which it never can). A printer's status starts as unknown until the first check or print attempt, rather than showing offline before anyone has looked.

A printer showing offline almost always means one of:

It's unplugged or powered off.
It's disconnected from WiFi (network printers can drop off WiFi after a power cut, the same as any other WiFi device).
The device running Biller isn't on the same network as the printer anymore (e.g. a router restart handed out a new IP to the printer).
The IP address configured in Biller no longer matches the printer's actual current IP (some routers reassign IPs on reconnect -- a static/ reserved IP on your router avoids this).

Automatic kitchen printing (KOT)

Once a printer with the Kitchen (or Both) role is set up and enabled, sending an order to the kitchen automatically prints a KOT there -- no extra tap needed. The on-screen kitchen ticket wall keeps working exactly as before alongside it; automatic KOT printing is an addition, not a replacement.

A printer that's temporarily unreachable never blocks or delays sending an order to the kitchen, or completing a bill -- printing is always best-effort. If a printer is offline, that ticket/receipt simply doesn't print; the order still reaches the kitchen (on the ticket wall) and the bill still completes normally either way.

Turning a printer off temporarily

Toggle a printer to disabled instead of deleting it if it's temporarily out of service (e.g. sent for repair) -- Biller simply skips a disabled printer in both the receipt and kitchen pipelines, and its configuration is still there, ready to re-enable.

USB (cable) printers

A printer cabled directly to a machine -- no network setup at all -- prints through the Biller Print Agent (the same small bridge app used for a cloud-hosted outlet's network printers, see "What you need" above): install and run the agent on the machine the printer is plugged into, then add the printer here with connection type USB and a Device / Queue Name instead of a host/IP:

Linux -- the device path, e.g. /dev/usb/lp0.
macOS -- the CUPS raw-queue name (find it with lpstat -p).
Windows -- the printer's name exactly as it appears in Settings -> Printers & scanners (e.g. EPSON TM-T88VI). No driver needed there either -- the agent spools the raw bytes directly to that printer name.

No printer driver is needed either way -- the agent writes raw ESC/POS bytes straight to the device/queue. Everything above (its own auto-print toggle, manual print, test-print, status, multi-printer routing) works the same for a USB printer as a network one, once the agent is running and connected.

Bluetooth printers

Bluetooth thermal printers can be added and labelled here too, but Biller's server doesn't print to them directly -- printing to a Bluetooth printer is done from Biller's mobile app, not automatically from here. If you only have a Bluetooth printer, see Printing your bills for the RawBT companion-app steps in the meantime.