Working offline
What happens to a till or a kiosk when the connection drops — and the one switch that decides it.
Admin → Settings → Business model → Offline terminals
The switch
Keep tills and kiosks working during an outage sits just under Services on the Business model tab. It ships off: a till holds sales on the machine and sends them when the connection returns, and a kiosk shows an out-of-service panel instead of a browser error.
The switch, and the one it is not
Two settings sound alike and mean entirely different things. Confusing them is how a payment method gets switched off by somebody reaching for a network setting.
| Setting | Means |
|---|---|
| Offline terminals | Keep tills and kiosks working during an outage. A hardware behaviour. |
| Pay at the counter | A customer settles in person instead of paying online. A payment method. |
This page is about the first. It is a platform-level switch — your operator sets it, not you.
With offline terminals on
A till that loses its connection keeps taking orders. They are held on the device and read Saved offline — it will sync when the connection returns. When the connection comes back they are sent, and appear in your orders as normal.
Service continues. That is the whole benefit, and for a busy restaurant during a broadband outage it is a large one.
With it off
The till says Connection unavailable. Reload the page. and a kiosk tells the customer Ordering is temporarily unavailable — please order at the counter. Nothing is held and nothing is lost, because nothing was taken.
Choosing
Which way to set it is a real trade-off, not an obvious win:
| Switch it on when | Leave it off when |
|---|---|
| Your connection is unreliable and stopping service costs more than the risk. | Your connection is solid and you would rather never reconcile a surprise. |
| Most takings are cash, so nothing depends on reaching a gateway. | Most takings are card, which cannot be authorised offline anyway. |
| You run one till, so nothing can conflict with another. | You run several, which can each sell stock the others do not know about. |
Try it
Cut the line, ring up sales, then reconnect. Watch where the orders live at each moment.
The restaurant on the floor
/vendor/pos · installed app · service worker + IndexedDB queue
/restaurant/{slug}/kiosk · installed app · cache only, no order queue
Your server 0 orders
Apache + MySQL — wherever the platform is hosted
What to do during an outage
- Keep taking orders if the till lets you, and watch for the offline marker.
- Expect card payments to fail — take cash, or take card details on your own machine and record it as "other".
- Tell the kitchen verbally. Nothing is reaching the board.
- When it returns, check your orders list against what you actually served.
When it doesn't work
Orders were not held
Offline terminals is off. Only your platform operator can change it, at Admin → Settings → Services.
Held orders did not sync
The device must be reopened on the same browser and machine — the queue lives there. Do not clear the browser's data on a till.
A synced order was refused
Something changed while it was held — a coupon expired, stock ran out. It appears with the problem rather than being silently dropped.
Cards will not take offline
Correct, and not a fault. Authorisation needs the gateway. Take cash, or use your own card machine and record it against the order afterwards.