📴 Carrying on when the website is down

Broadband drops out. Hosting has a bad afternoon. Somebody unplugs the router to hoover. None of it stops people wanting a drink, so none of it stops the till.

What actually happens

• The tablet keeps its own copy of the price list, the open session and the member list, refreshed every time the till loads normally.
• The moment a request goes unanswered, an orange bar appears across the top of the till saying it is offline and how many sales are waiting on the tablet. It is deliberately loud: a steward taking money needs to know that what they are ringing up is not in the club’s books yet.
• Serving carries on exactly as before — tiles, basket, discounts, cash, card, split payments, change.
• Each completed sale is written to the tablet before the steward is told it is done, and the receipt is printed from the tablet. It carries a short reference instead of a receipt number, because the number is allocated by the website.
• Every twenty seconds the till quietly tries the website again. When it answers, the queue goes up automatically and the bar turns green until it is empty.

What does not work offline, and why

• Settling a member’s account — it needs to know what they owe, and a figure cached this morning is not a balance. Take the money as an ordinary sale, or ask them to come back.
• Reprinting an old receipt — those live on the website. The slip from an offline sale has its reference on it, and that reference finds the sale once everything has caught up.
• Cashing up — a Z-read has to be taken against the real books. Wait until the queue is empty.
• Opening a session — a till that has never been opened has no starting float, so there is nothing to reconcile a drawer against. This is the one case where an outage really does stop you: open the till while the website is reachable.

Sales on account, offline

Offline the till cannot see what anybody already owes. Rather than pretend otherwise, there is a per-sale cap — £20 out of the box, changed under Settings, or nothing at all if you would rather. It limits what one round can put on one account while nobody can look anything up. If your club would rather not take the risk at all, switch offline account sales off and an offline sale must be cash or card.

The staff PIN

The PIN is checked on the server, which is what makes it a real control rather than a screen to click past — and it means it cannot be checked while the server is unreachable. So a tablet that was already unlocked carries on under the unlock it already had, for as long as that unlock was granted for (twelve hours by default). A tablet whose unlock has run out cannot be unlocked until the website is back. If your club runs through outages regularly, lengthen the unlock window under Settings.

What to do while it is offline

Nothing, other than leave the page open and carry on serving. Closing the browser will not lose the queue — it is stored on the tablet, not in the page — but reopening needs the tablet to have loaded the till at least once beforehand.

Common questions

Do we have to switch this on?

No. It is on out of the box, because a club that needs it will not have thought to switch it on beforehand and by then it is too late. It costs nothing while everything is working. It can be turned off under Till & Shop, Settings.

The tablet has never been used before and there is no internet.

Then there is nothing it can sell — it has never seen your price list. Open the till on that tablet once while the website is reachable and it will work without it afterwards. This is worth doing deliberately on any new tablet rather than finding out on a bad day.

Will a sale be rung up twice?

No. Every sale is given a reference on the tablet when it is completed, and the club website refuses a second sale carrying a reference it has already seen. That is what makes it safe for the tablet to keep trying until it is told the sale landed — including when the reply gets lost on the way back, which is the case that used to be a real risk on a poor connection even without an outage.

What time do the sales end up recorded at?

The time they actually happened, taken from the tablet, not the time they arrived. Three hours of trading landing in one minute would make the takings report and the Z-read nonsense. They also land in the till session that was open at the time, even if it has since been cashed up — which is the honest answer, though it does mean the Z-read was taken without them.

A sale came back refused after the outage.

The bar says how many, and they stay on the tablet rather than disappearing. The usual cause is that the till had no session open at all on the day in question. An administrator can enter those few sales by hand from Till & Shop, Sales.

Can we cash up while sales are still waiting?

The till will not offer it, and that is deliberate — counting a drawer against takings that have not arrived yet gives a variance that means nothing. Wait for the bar to clear, which normally takes seconds once the website is back.

Does the stock count go wrong?

No. Stock comes off when the sale reaches the website, so it catches up with the shelf rather than the shelf catching up with it. If you have “refuse a sale when stock has run out” switched on, note that it cannot be enforced offline — the crisps left the shelf either way, and the count is corrected when the sale syncs.

What about card payments?

Unaffected. Pavilion records that a sale was paid by card; the money is taken on your own card machine, which has nothing to do with your website. If your card machine is on the same broken broadband, that is a separate problem with a separate answer.

Is the member list on the tablet a data protection worry?

It is names and membership numbers only — no addresses, no contact details, no balances, nothing about what anybody owes. It is the minimum needed to put a name to a sale, and it is only kept when offline selling is switched on. It sits in the browser’s own storage on a tablet that already has to be signed in to a steward account and past the PIN.

How long can it stay offline?

Comfortably an afternoon; the queue is not capped and nothing expires. What does eventually run out is the staff PIN unlock, which is twelve hours by default, and the sensible outer limit is the seven days after which the website stops believing the tablet’s clock. If you are ever offline for days rather than hours you have a bigger problem than the till.

Our second tablet did not go offline at the same time.

Each tablet queues its own sales and syncs its own. Two tills covering the same bar during an outage will both end up complete; they simply arrive separately.