The sixty-second answer
Yes, if both locations run on one phone system: a transfer between towns then works exactly like a transfer between two desks. If each site has its own separate phone service, no transfer exists at all, and the best you can do is ask the caller to hang up and dial the other number.
The dividing line is one system or two
Every version of this question — the shop and the office, the clinic in two towns, the yard and the front counter, the owner at home and the staff on site — comes down to a single fact. Either both locations are extensions of one phone system, or they are two unrelated phone services that happen to belong to the same business.
If they are one system, transferring a caller from a location in one town to a location in another is identical to transferring across a hallway. The caller stays connected the whole time, and neither the caller nor your staff needs to know where anyone physically is.
If they are two separate services, there is nothing to transfer with. The call arrived on one site's phone service and that service has no relationship with the other one. The only move available is to read out another number and hope. In practice a real share of those callers never dial it, and the ones who do arrive irritated at having explained themselves twice.
This is why the multi-location question is really a dial plan question rather than a feature question. Both sites need to share one numbering scheme, so that dialling an extension reaches a person regardless of geography. That is the subject of multi-site and remote workers on one dial plan.
How a transfer between locations actually works
Nothing exotic happens. On a modern phone system, a person's extension is a published identity that the system maps to wherever they are currently reachable, and that mapping is kept up to date by their devices registering themselves — with a user explicitly not limited to registering from a single device [2]. A phone at your second location registers to the same system as the phone at your first. From the system's point of view, they are neighbours.
The transfer itself comes in the standard flavours, all of which are ordinary call control services [1]:
Blind transfer. You send the caller straight to the other extension without speaking to anyone first. Fast, and appropriate when the caller has asked for a specific person by name.
Consultative or attended transfer. You put the caller on hold, call your colleague, explain who is waiting and why, and then complete the handoff. Slower, and better for almost everything else, because the caller does not have to repeat their story.
Transfer to a mailbox. Sometimes the right answer is to place the caller directly into the right person's voicemail rather than into an unanswered ring.
Call control standards also account for the case where the far end does not support a transfer cleanly, with defined recovery behaviour [1]. That is worth knowing because it is the mechanism behind a frustration people report as "our transfers randomly fail": some of those failures are mixed equipment interacting badly, not a network fault.
The five things that actually break multi-location transfers
1. Nobody decided what happens if the transfer is not answered. This is the biggest one and it has nothing to do with technology. A transfer to a second location that rings out into an empty room is worse than no transfer, because you told the caller you were connecting them to someone. Decide up front: does it return to the person who transferred it, go to a monitored mailbox, or ring a group at the original site? Configure that once and it stops being a problem forever.
2. Transferring to an outside mobile number. The moment a call leaves your system to an ordinary mobile number, you have lost it. If that mobile is off, the caller reaches somebody's personal voicemail greeting, and no one in the business knows the call happened. The fix is to put the mobile inside the system as an extension, so an unanswered transfer comes back to the business. That is covered in answering business calls on your cell phone.
3. Caller ID confusion at the receiving end. If the person at site two sees the internal extension of the person transferring rather than any indication of who is on the line, they answer casually into a customer call. Look for a system that shows the receiving person the original caller, and prefer attended transfers where context matters.
4. Time zones. Two locations in different provinces have different opening hours, and a transfer at 4:30 in one time zone can be a transfer into a closed office in another. Business hours have to be configured per location, not once for the company. See after-hours and holiday call routing.
5. The network path at the second site. Audio quality on a transferred call is a function of the receiving site's connection, and live voice is carried by a protocol that does not guarantee delivery, does not prevent out-of-order arrival, and does not assume the network below it is reliable [3]. Delay compounds it: recommended planning guidance treats 400 ms of one-way delay as a ceiling that should not be exceeded, with interactive voice affected below that [4]. A second location on a marginal connection produces calls where both people talk over each other, and staff blame the transfer. Sizing each site is covered in bandwidth and quality of service requirements; the symptom list is in why business calls keep dropping.
What multi-location transfer buys beyond convenience
Three things, and only the first is obvious.
Callers stop being bounced. One published number, answered anywhere, transferred anywhere. The customer does not need a map of your organisation to get help.
Coverage becomes shared. If the front counter at one site is swamped, calls can be answered at the other. For businesses in smaller Canadian markets — where 1.08 million of the country's 1.10 million employer businesses are small, and in a province like New Brunswick 20,256 of 20,631 employer businesses are small [6] — that shared coverage is often the difference between answering the phone and not.
You can measure the business as one business. Call volume, missed calls and answer times across locations become one picture rather than two anecdotes.
The privacy point when calls cross sites
A transferred call carries customer information with it, and if you record calls or take notes, that information now exists in more than one place. PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires knowledge and consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, bars its use for other purposes without consent, and requires your policies and practices to be readily available to the individuals concerned [5]. Practically, that means one policy for the company rather than a different informal habit at each location, and a clear rule about who at which site can access recordings and voicemail. The detail is in PIPEDA-compliant call recording.
Where we sit
We run hosted phone systems where two, three or ten locations sit on one dial plan. Extensions are unique across the whole business, so transferring between towns is the same three keystrokes as transferring between desks, and remote staff or mobiles are simply more extensions rather than a separate arrangement.
The honest limits: we cannot make a transfer arrive well at a location with an inadequate internet connection, and we cannot rescue a call transferred to an outside mobile number that is switched off. What we will do is set the unanswered-transfer behaviour deliberately at both ends, because that is the failure that actually costs businesses customers.
What is included and how extensions across locations are counted is published on our pricing page. If you are still working out how much simultaneous capacity each site needs, start with how many phone lines does my business need, and if the word extension is doing a lot of unexplained work in the quotes you are reading, start with what is a phone extension.