The broadband is down and there are four people at the counter. Now what?

Short answer: serve the customers on paper, get a phone hotspot running as your real fallback, and re-key the paper afterwards in one batch. The plan matters more than the technology.

First: is it actually the internet?

Before you declare an outage, check whether the tablet alone has dropped off the Wi-Fi — the single commonest cause. Then check whether another device can load any website. If other sites load but your order system does not, it is not your broadband, and the queue can wait the two minutes it takes to establish that.

The fallback that actually works: a phone hotspot

Every counter tablet should already have been connected once to a nominated staff phone’s hotspot, so reconnecting is two taps rather than a password hunt. Order entry is a tiny amount of data — a hotspot handles a busy counter comfortably. Test this quarterly, not during an outage.

If there is no signal either: paper, deliberately

Keep a pad at the counter with a fixed set of fields: date, customer name, account or postcode, SKU and quantity per line, any agreed price, delivery or collection, payment taken or not. The discipline is in the fields — a scribbled description with no SKU costs someone twenty minutes later.

Let the goods go if you know the customer. The risk of a customer walking out with stock is smaller than the risk of them walking out without ordering.

Afterwards: re-key in one batch, then reconcile

When the connection returns, enter every paper order before you do anything else, in order, and tick each slip as it goes in. Then compare the tick count to the slip count. The failure mode here is entering some orders, getting interrupted by a customer, and never finishing — which shows up a week later as stock levels that look wrong.

What to fix so it hurts less next time

Two things: a second connection path that is already configured, and a counter process that does not depend on one person remembering how the fallback works. Write the outage plan on the same A4 as your counter conventions.

Trade Order POS runs in a browser on whatever device has a connection — tablet, phone or back-office desktop — so a hotspot on someone’s phone is a genuine fallback rather than a theoretical one. Find out more →

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.