Using the till when the internet drops
What keeps working, what has to wait, and how orders catch up once you're back online.
Service does not stop just because the broadband has, so the till is built to keep going without a connection. When it loses one, a banner appears at the top of the screen: Offline — orders are saved on this till and sync when back online. That banner is your sign that everything you do from now on is being stored on the device itself until it can be sent.
What still works
- Taking orders and adding items to them.
- Seating tables and moving bills between them.
- Discounts, service charge and MISC items.
- Taking cash and card payments.
- Printing, as long as the printer is connected to the till itself, which means over Bluetooth, over the venue’s own network, or built into the device.
Each order you take while offline is saved on that till and marked Queued — will sync, so you can see for yourself that nothing has been lost.
What has to wait
Anything that has to reach the outside world cannot happen until the connection is back. In practice that means:
- Emailing or texting a receipt to a customer.
- Cloud printing, which covers printers that receive their tickets over the internet rather than through the till.
- Looking up a customer who has never been served on this particular till before, because their details live online rather than on the device.
In each case the till tells you that it needs a connection rather than failing silently, so you know to promise the customer their receipt shortly instead of assuming it has already gone.
When the connection comes back
The banner changes to Back online — syncing queued orders and the till sends everything through on its own. There is no button to press and nothing to remember. Once it has finished, the orders appear on your dashboard and in your reports exactly as though they had been taken normally.
If something doesn’t sync
Now and then an order cannot go through, and by far the most common reason is that the till was signed out at some point while it was offline. When that happens the banner says orders could not sync — needs attention.
- Check that the device really is back online by opening any other website on it, because a tablet can show full signal and still have no working connection.
- If you have been signed out, sign back in. The till then sends the waiting orders by itself.
- If the warning is still there after that, contact support before you clear anything from that till. The orders are still stored on the device and we can recover them, but only while they are still on there.
Tills cannot see each other’s orders during an outage. While a till is offline, the orders it is taking exist only on that device, so the other tills have no way of knowing about them. If two tills are working the same floor while the internet is down, keep each of them on their own tables until everything has synced, otherwise you can end up with two separate bills for the same table.
Last updated 20 September 2026