A 2023 survey by Instant Offices found that printer access still ranks among the top five amenities coworking members expect on day one. Yet most operators will tell you printing is also one of the top five sources of daily complaints. Paper jams, unclear cost allocation and devices that go offline during peak hours are small problems that create outsized frustration. If your members cannot print a contract or scan a signed document when they need to, they start questioning the value of their membership. 

The Cost Tracking Problem Hits Your Margins 

Most coworking spaces offer some amount of printing in their membership packages. The trouble starts when nobody tracks who prints what. A five-person team burning through 2,000 pages a month on a plan that includes 200 creates a real cost gap. Without per-member or per-team tracking, that gap comes straight out of your operating margin. 

Some operators try to manage this with honor systems or manual log sheets at the printer. Neither scale. Members forget to log. Staff forget to reconcile. 

Automated print tracking tied to member accounts solves this. When every print job logs against a specific membership, you can bill overages accurately and spot usage trends before they become budget problems. 

Hardware Failures are a Member Experience Issue 

A single networked printer serving 80 members is a bottleneck waiting to happen. Toner runs out mid-morning. A paper jam during a client meeting means your member is apologizing on your behalf. 

Operators who run lean on print hardware often do so because printers feel like a low priority compared to desks and internet. But the math shifts when you calculate the support time your community managers spend troubleshooting paper trays instead of onboarding new members. 

Two practical moves help here. First, maintain a second device as a backup, even a basic laser printer reduces the single-point-of-failure risk. Second, set up automated supply alerts so toner replacements arrive before the cartridge is empty, not after. 

Access and Security Gaps Create Liability 

In shared environments, print jobs sit in open trays. That is a problem when your members include law firms, accountants and healthcare consultants handling sensitive documents. 

A misplaced printout containing client financials is not just embarrassing. Depending on the jurisdiction, it can trigger compliance violations. 

Pull-printing solves this cleanly. Members send a job to the queue and release it only when they are standing at the device, typically with a PIN or access card. No unclaimed pages sitting in the tray. No documents picked up by the wrong person. 

How Yardi Kube Helps You Manage Print Operations 

When print tracking lives inside your workspace management platform, you stop chasing spreadsheets. Yardi Kube coworking software lets you tie print usage directly to member accounts and automate overage billing so your team is not manually reconciling logs at month end. You can monitor resource usage across locations from a single dashboard, which matters as soon as you operate more than one site. 

If printing headaches are eating into your community team’s time, explore how Yardi Kube centralizes resource management by scheduling a demo below. 

Conclusion 

Printing is not glamorous. It will never make your Instagram page. But it is one of the operational details that separates a coworking space members tolerate from one they recommend. Track usage automatically, maintain backup hardware, protect sensitive documents with pull-printing and tie it all into a platform that handles billing without manual work. The fixes are straightforward. The cost of ignoring them is not.