You can keep taking cash while the connection is down. Nothing else about the sale is guaranteed to come back the way you rang it, so read the review list at the bottom before you rely on this for a whole day.
How you know you are offline
On the sale screen, a red bar announces that you are offline and shows how many sales are pending on this device.
The Offline chip in the top bar also reads the device's sales queue. Click it for connection status, elapsed offline time and queued transactions. When the connection returns and sales remain pending, its Sync Now button retries them. Follow the sale-screen bar while you work; if the displays disagree, check the pending queue and Sales History before entering any replacement sale.
What still works
- The product grid, from what was already loaded before the connection dropped.
- Searching within that loaded set. Type part of a product's name and tap its tile.
- Cash checkout. Ring the sale, take cash, press through. The cart clears and a short confirmation appears for a few seconds.
What does not work
- Scanning. Every scan asks the server for the code, so while you are offline a scan shows Barcode lookup failed and nothing is added to the cart. It is not a fault with the label or the scanner. Type part of the product's name and tap the tile instead — that works from the products already loaded.
- Card. The terminal is reached over the network. There is no card tender offline, and no way to record one. If a queued sale does somehow carry a card amount, the server refuses it on sync with Card payments cannot be verified offline — complete this sale online and it stays stuck in the queue for ever.
- A receipt. The sale has no number until it syncs, so there is nothing to print. Write the total on a slip by hand if the customer needs something.
- Looking a customer up, so no rewards and, in practice, no store credit. A customer already attached to the cart before the drop stays attached.
- Misc items. An ad-hoc line typed in at the counter can never sync — it is refused every time and sits in the queue for ever. Do not ring a misc item while offline.
- Reloading the page. The app itself is not stored on the device. If the browser is refreshed, the tab is closed, or the machine restarts while offline, the till will not come back up until the connection does — and anything already queued is still safe on that device, waiting.
Do not close the browser and do not refresh while you are offline. That is the single most important rule on this page.
When the connection returns
The device syncs on its own. The bar turns yellow — Back online — syncing 2/3 transactions... — and then green: All transactions synced successfully.
If the bar instead settles on N transactions pending sync with a Sync Now button and the number does not fall, one of the queued sales is being refused every time. Press Sync Now once. If the number still does not move, that sale will never go through without attention. Check Sales History for a completed copy, then ask Stratamize to resolve the queued sale, giving its approximate time and amount. Do not ring a replacement until you know the original was not recorded and the queued copy will not later sync.
Check every offline sale afterwards
An offline sale is checked and rebuilt when it syncs. Open Sales History, find the synced sales and check:
- The price. Each line is re-priced from the catalog as it stands when the sale syncs, not at what you charged. If a price changed in between, the recorded sale uses the new one.
- The tax. Recalculated at your store's default rate across the whole sale. Per-product rates and tax-exempt products are not applied.
- The cashier. The sale is recorded against whoever is signed in on the device when the sync runs, not the cashier who rang it.
- The register and location. The sale lands on register 1, and on whichever location this browser last had selected — on a shop with more than one till, very likely the wrong one. Use This Register helps here only while the browser stays open: after the browser is closed and reopened the sync falls back to register 1 again, even though you are still signed in and the till still shows the right register. Press it again after any restart, and check the register on every synced sale either way. See Settings → Locations and registers.
- Serial numbers. A unit selected before the outage keeps its serial when the sale syncs. Verify the correct unit is marked sold. If another register sold it first, the queued sale is refused; ask a manager to resolve the conflict rather than changing the serial record to force it through.
If a queued sale contains a misc item, or a product that has since been deleted, the sync refuses it with Unknown product and it stays in the queue. Ask for help resolving the queued copy before entering a replacement online.
The honest summary
Offline mode is a way to keep taking cash through a short outage without turning customers away. It is not a way to run a normal trading day. For an outage longer than an hour, consider writing sales down and entering them once you are back — you will get an opportunity to verify the price, tax, cashier, register and serial before completing each sale.