It is 6:30 pm, the shop is full, and the signal disappears. The seller has a customer in front of them with three items and a 5,000 note. What does the software do?
That is the only question that matters, and it is the one people forget to ask in a demo, because in a demo the network works.
"Offline": the promise and the reality
Almost all till software writes "works offline" on its page. That can mean three very different things.
It shows the screens but refuses to confirm the sale until it has talked to the server. The seller sees the catalogue, taps the items, and the "take payment" button spins. This is the most common case, and it is useless.
It confirms the sale but the receipt, the stock and the book wait. The customer leaves without a receipt, and if the seller does not remember what went out during the outage, the stock is wrong the next day.
It does the whole sale: takes payment, produces the receipt, removes from local stock, writes the credit, lets you close the till, and sends all of it when the signal returns. That is offline.
The difference is not visible on the sales screen. It is visible at 6:30 pm.
What an offline sale has to do, point by point
Here is the list to demand. Each point can be checked in five minutes in flight mode.
- Take payment in cash, Mobile Money (see below) and credit, with the change calculated.
- Give a receipt. Printed if you have a printer; otherwise the receipt must be ready to go and go on its own as soon as the signal returns, without the seller thinking about it again.
- Reduce stock on the phone, so the seller sees "2 left" and not "5 left" on the next item.
- Write the credit take on the customer's account, with the new balance visible straight away.
- Close the till at the end of the day, with the drawer count, even if the network has not come back.
- Send all of it in order when the signal returns, without duplicates and without the seller pressing anything.
If one of these points is missing, the 6:30 pm outage becomes a hole in the accounts.
The trap of sales that "go up later"
A sale made offline at 6:30 pm and sent at 9 pm must be dated 6:30 pm, not 9 pm. It sounds like a detail. It is not: if the software dates the sale at send time, the evening report is wrong, the till closing does not match, and a sale made on Thursday can land in Friday.
Question to ask: "A sale made without network at 6:30 pm and sent at 9 pm, what time does it show in my report?" The right answer is 6:30 pm.
And the reverse: a phone with the wrong clock must not be able to send a sale dated next week. The software must see it and say so.
Mobile Money is the exception, and that is normal
An MTN MoMo or Orange Money payment is confirmed by the operator. No network, no confirmation, whatever the software. That is not a weakness of the software, it is the nature of the payment.
What good software does: it lets the seller record the sale as paid by MoMo, marks it "to verify", and shows it to you in a list when the network returns, to reconcile with the operator's SMS. What bad software does: it blocks the sale, and the seller takes the money "beside", on a scrap of paper, and the sale disappears from the accounts.
How to check before you buy
Do not ask "does it work offline?". Do the test, with the seller's phone, not the salesperson's:
- Put the phone in flight mode.
- Make one cash sale, one on credit, one by MoMo.
- See whether the item's stock went down, on the phone.
- Close the till.
- Turn the network back on, wait a minute, and look at the report: are the three sales there, at the right time, once each?
Ten minutes. If the salesperson hesitates to do the test, you have your answer.
How Remora Sales does it
Remora Sales was built for the 6:30 pm outage, not in spite of it. The whole sale happens on the phone: payment, receipt, stock, credit, till closing. Sales wait on the phone, dated at the time they were made, and go up on their own as soon as the network returns. The receipt goes out on Nyocte, or on WhatsApp and SMS, at the moment the sale goes up. A sale dated in the future by a phone with a wrong clock is flagged instead of accepted. And a seller who tries to sell the last item already sold on the other phone sees stock at zero when the two meet again, not an invented stock.
We do the flight-mode test with you at setup, on your phone, with your products. Request a setup and keep the list above to hand.