Solutions
Billing without a connection
Keep the counter selling through a line drop, and reconcile in order when the connection returns.
The problem
A cloud till stops being a till the moment the line drops. Sales get written on paper to be typed in later, which is where the stock count and the day’s takings start to disagree.
What changes
The point of sale bills entirely offline, prices, stock, customers and receipts all work with no connection, and syncs in order when the line returns, so the sequence of the day is preserved rather than reconstructed.
How it works
- The till holds what it needs to sell: items, prices, customers and credit limits.
- The connection drops. Billing, receipts and stock movements continue unchanged.
- Each sale is recorded locally in the order it happened.
- The connection returns and the queue syncs in sequence, including any FBR invoices.
- Stock, ledgers and the day’s takings reconcile without anyone re-typing a paper list.
What you get
- The counter never stops selling because of an outage.
- No paper-to-keyboard step, which is where counts and cash usually diverge.
- Designed for 3G and intermittent DSL, not a fibre office.
- Runs on desktop, touch terminal or Android tablet.
In practice
Who it is for, and what setup involves
What the register actually holds locally
Items and their prices, the price list or per-customer rate that applies, stock positions, customer balances and credit limits, and the tax treatment of each line. Enough to complete a sale correctly without asking anything of the network.
What it does not hold is the whole history of your business. It holds what selling requires, which is why a modest Android tablet is sufficient and why the sync when the line returns is quick rather than a nightly batch.
Where an outage still costs you something
Card authorisation. That needs the payment network, and no till design changes it. Cash and credit sales complete normally and the invoice queues either way, but a shop that takes mostly cards should understand that the limit is the acquirer rather than the software.
The second honest limit is a shared stock position. If two counters are offline at once and both sell the last unit of something, both sales are real and both are recorded. The resulting position is visible rather than silently corrected, and a physical count resolves it. We would rather show you a discrepancy than hide one.
Why the visible queue matters more than the offline mode
Plenty of software can buffer a request. The difference is whether a person can see the buffer. A silent retry looks exactly like success until the month is reconciled and the declared sales do not match the till.
So the queue is a number on screen that falls to zero, and anything rejected stays in the list with its reason attached. That is the feature. The offline billing is just what makes it necessary.
What it costs
Offline billing is not an add-on. It is how the point of sale works, included at PKR 1,000 a month per register.
Terms
Terms used on this page
Plain definitions of the words a buyer here actually searches for.
- Offline-first
- Software designed so that no connection is the normal case rather than a degraded mode, meaning billing, pricing and stock all work with the network absent.
- Sync in order
- Replaying locally recorded sales in the sequence they happened, so stock movements and ledgers reconstruct correctly rather than in whatever order they upload.
- Queue depth
- How many records are waiting to be sent, shown as a number a person can watch fall to zero rather than a background process nobody can see.
- Reconciliation
- Checking that recorded sales, stock movements and cash agree, which is where a paper-to-keyboard step usually reveals a discrepancy.
- Intermittent connectivity
- A connection that drops and returns repeatedly, which is harder to design for than no connection at all because software must handle partial state.
Questions people ask before they buy
Twenty minutes, your own data, no slides.
Bring a month of your own sales, a payslip you argue about, or last term’s fee sheet. We will show you what it looks like in MjFour.