Offline POS for load-shedding
Three ways to run it. Here's where each one honestly stands.
Most vendors show you a feature list. We'd rather show you the state of the road, including the rough parts, because you're the one who has to trade on it.
| Setup | Sells offline | Tills per shop | Where the data lives | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In the cloud | No | Any number | Our cloud | Available now |
| One till, installed | Yes | Exactly one | That till | Available today |
| Hub and thin tills | Yes | Several | The hub machine | Available now |
In the cloud
Open a browser, sign in and sell. Any reasonably modern PC, laptop or tablet becomes a till in minutes, with nothing to install and nothing to back up yourself.
The trade-off: no connection, no selling. If your line is reliable, this is the simplest way to run.
One till, installed
Install the desktop app on a single Windows POS device and that till stands on its own. It sells with zero connectivity and catches up with the cloud once a connection appears.
The trade-off: Windows only, and strictly one till per shop, on the Starter plan and above. We install it with you rather than a self-serve download.
Hub and thin tills
One machine in the shop runs the hub, and every other till works off it over your own shop network rather than keeping a separate copy of its own. The whole floor keeps trading through an outage together and reaches the cloud as one. It's available now, so talk to us and we'll size the hub machine for your floor.
The trade-off: one machine has to stay on and reachable over your own shop network, and if it goes down the floor goes with it. We install it with you rather than a self-serve download.
Some things go up. Some things come down.
Each kind of record has one owner, so catching up is routine, not risky.
- One writer per store, so there's nothing to merge
- Sales reach the cloud in minutes rather than instantly, steady by design
- An installed till keeps working for about three days out of contact, then it needs to reach us once
The till pushes up
Sales, and the stock movements they cause
The cloud sends down
Products and price changes from the Back Office
How offline selling works: while online, each sale reaches the Back Office as it happens. When the power cuts, the connection drops but the till keeps selling. Sales are held on the device and receipts still print. Once the connection is back they arrive in the order they happened. Everything is up to date, nothing to re-capture.
1
Online: sales sync as they happen
The sale completes on the till straight away, and each transaction goes up to the Back Office.
2
Power cut: the till keeps selling
Nothing about the way you sell changes. Completed sales are held safely on the till, and receipts still print.
3
Reconnected: sales arrive in order, in minutes
Once a connection returns, sales made during the outage reach the Back Office in the order they happened.
4
All sales synced. Nothing to re-capture.
Stock levels, reports and audit trails catch up automatically. No end-of-day re-typing from a notebook.
- Held on the till itself
- Sales made during an outage stay on the till until they reach the cloud. Nothing depends on anyone else's system.
- The day, in order
- When the connection comes back, sales arrive in the order they happened, so the record reads the way the day ran.
- One writer per store
- Only the store's own till writes its sales, so there is nothing to merge: no duplicates, no guessing which number is right.
- Failures held for review
- Anything that cannot apply cleanly is held with the full record and flagged on the till, never silently dropped, and can be retried once the cause is fixed.
Offline selling on Windows is available on the Starter, Professional and Enterprise plans. See plans
The honest list
What works offline, and what needs a connection
Keeps working offline
- Ringing up sales and returns
- Barcode scanning and price lookup
- Discounts and customer accounts at the till
- Receipt and kitchen ticket printing on your own printers
- Your own receipt text and branding
- Cash drawer and cash payments
- Stock movements from sales, recorded locally
Waits for reconnection
- First-time activation and store setup
- Pulling new products and price changes from the Back Office
- Cross-store reporting and dashboards
- Card payments (your card machine’s own network applies)
Being upfront about this beats finding out mid-outage: the selling carries on, and everything that needs the cloud catches up within minutes of you being back online.
One shop, one source of truth
You could install the desktop app separately on every till. It would even seem to work at first. But each install keeps its own separate database, so till two never sees till one's sale, and with the connection down, it never will. Two cashiers ring up the last unit, and on the next sync one of those sales quietly overwrites the other.
So we don't support running several tills offline without a hub, and we won't sell it to you that way. If more than one till in your shop needs to survive an outage, one machine needs to hold the truth for all of them. That's the hub, and it's available now. We'd rather lose a sale than let your stock counts drift.
Choosing
A short way to decide
Line is fine
Reliable connection, and no hard need to sell through outages? Run in the cloud. Simplest by a distance.
Start freeOne till must not stop
A single till, and outages you can't trade through? Install the desktop app on it. Available today.
Talk to usSeveral tills must not stop
Two or more tills that all need to keep selling? That's the hub, and it's available now. Talk to us and we'll size it for your floor.
Ask about the hubOffline POS questions, answered
Start in a browser today.
You can add an installed till later without starting over. Your data comes with you.