Offline Mode

Offline mode is what a system keeps doing when the internet drops and the work has to carry on. The screen stays open, the sale still goes through, and the record waits on the device until the connection returns. Then it is sent up and joins everything else. For a shop on a busy street, that gap is the difference between a queue that keeps moving and a queue that walks out.

Not everything can be queued. A sale can, because the price and the product list already sit on the tablet. A card payment usually cannot, because the bank has to answer while the customer stands there. Checking a discount code against head office cannot either. Anything that needs an answer from elsewhere stops. Anything that only needs writing down carries on. Linkysoft draws that line on paper with the client before a single screen is built.

The surprises come at sync time, not during the outage. The classic one is the duplicate receipt. A cashier presses print, sees nothing happen, presses again, and two identical sales arrive an hour later. A system that gives every sale its own number on the device catches that. One that numbers sales on the server does not. The other surprise is two branches editing the same record while both are cut off. One of them will lose, and you want to know in advance which one, and whether anybody is told.

Stock is where it hurts most. If two counters sell the last unit of the same item while offline, the shelf is empty and the system is not. Storek keeps stock per branch and raises a flag on the clash instead of quietly picking a winner. Linkysoft treats that flag as part of the design, because a silent overwrite is a problem you find weeks later in a stock count, with no way to tell which sale was real.

Ask a supplier three plain questions. How long can we work offline before the device fills up. What exactly stops working. And when the connection returns, who reviews the conflicts. Linkysoft answers all three in writing before quoting a web application project, and the same questions apply to the phone app your delivery drivers carry.