When the internet drops
Everybody asks, and the answer is not "it will not happen". On a mountain in January or an island in August, it will.
Keeps working
The app keeps the last synced state locally. If the line drops, or you reload on a dead connection, the screens still render, clearly marked with when they were last updated.
- Today's and all active bookings
- Who has taken what, and when it is due
- Customer names and phone numbers
- The whole inventory, with codes, sizes and prices
- Today's overdue list
- Search across all of it
In practice that covers most of what a counter gets asked: where something is, who has it, what it costs.
Waits
Anything that moves stock needs the server, and there is a reason. Only it knows whether the last pair of skis is still free. If two tills rented it out offline at the same moment, you would have two customers and one pair.
- Creating a new booking
- Recording a return
- Adding or editing equipment
- Taking payment and changing payment status
The moment the connection is back, you carry on where you left off. Nothing you had already entered is lost.
What to do in the shop
The software is half the answer. The other half is the same routine every card terminal already follows.
- 1
A 4G backup
A cheap router with a second SIM, or tethering from a phone. It costs about ten euros a month and covers nearly every real outage, because both networks rarely go down together.
- 2
The morning PDF
Every morning a list of active rentals and today's returns downloads automatically. Print it or keep it on the tablet. If everything goes down, you work from that and enter the movements afterwards.
- 3
Paper for the rush
In the busy hour, write the codes on paper and enter them in a batch once it calms down. Two minutes of typing beats twenty minutes of queue.
What is coming
The next release adds an offline queue for scan-to-return: returns are recorded locally and sync the moment the network is back, with conflict checks on the server. Returns come first because that is where the queue forms.
If working without a connection is critical for you, tell us how you work. The shops that tell us set the order.
Tell us what you need