Keep the till open when the internet drops
In a lot of neighbourhoods the line fails in the middle of the afternoon, or the router restarts, or the phone has data and the shop Wi-Fi does not. The customer is standing there with the goods. A billing app that refuses to move until it can reach a server makes you write the sale on paper and type it again later, which is how the paper copy and the software copy stop matching.
The job at that moment is small: name the items, take the money or mark it as udhaar, and hand over a receipt. Everything else can wait for the connection.
What to do at the counter
- Keep selling on the device that already has today's items on it. Do not switch to a second phone that has never opened the till, because that phone may not have the prices.
- Scan the barcode if the pack has one. If it does not, pick the item by name. Check the quantity and the NPR amount before you take payment. A wrong price is harder to fix than a slow lookup.
- Take cash, or record the sale against the customer if they are paying later. Say the total out loud. Give the receipt from the till, not a second handwritten slip, so there is one record of the sale.
- If you run the counter in shifts, close the shift when that person leaves, including when the network is down. The close is a count of what that shift sold. Leaving it open until "the net comes back" mixes two people's sales into one bag of cash.
When the connection returns, leave the phone on the app for a minute so the sales it stored can upload. Do not clear the app or uninstall it to "fix" a spinner. The sales are on the phone until they have gone up.
What still needs the network
The till can finish a sale with no connection. The rest of the app cannot. Writing a sales invoice, entering a purchase bill, moving stock, reading a report, and inviting a teammate all need the server. If the line is down, do those when it is back. Do not keep a parallel paper invoice book for the same sales the till already took: you will double them.
Two phones selling the same last piece while both are offline can disagree about what is left. The sale on the phone still happened for the customer. Sort the stock count when you are online again, the same way you would if two people sold from one shelf without looking at each other. A low-stock habit, described in tracking stock for a small shop, matters more on days the network is unreliable, because you cannot ask the server what is left.
Tax on that sale
If the item already has its tax, the till uses it while you are offline too. You do not recalculate 13% on a calculator beside the phone. How to set that rate on a bill is covered in putting 13% VAT on a bill. The till does not file anything with IRD. It only records the tax that was on the sale.
Where this sits in ERPesque
Point of Sale in ERPesque writes the sale on the phone first. You can check out, scan a barcode, and close a shift when the connection drops. The end-of-day report for that shift is not edited afterwards. Other screens still need a connection. When the phone is online again, the till sales sync.
Download ERPesque from Google Play on the phone that sits at the counter, and open Point of Sale once while you still have a connection, so the items are already there when the line fails.