Offline behaviour

The app is built to keep serving when the connection is not there. It does not pretend everything works, though, and the difference matters.

What keeps working

Orders carry on:

Offline — orders save on this device and sync when you reconnect.

The menu, tables, printers and receipt layouts all come from a copy held on the device, so you can ring up, print a ticket and print a receipt with no internet at all. Cash payments work normally. Reservations keep showing what the device last downloaded.

What stops

Blocked offline	Why
Card Tap to Pay	The payment has to be authorised by the card network.
Bill discounts	Validated on the server, so Connect to apply a bill discount.
Coupon checks	Same reason.
Anything you look up rather than create	Reports and lists need the server.

For card, the app offers the honest alternative:

Card Tap-to-Pay needs internet. Use Cash, or record Card to sync later.

Recording Card means you took the money on your own standalone terminal and are telling RestroManage about it; the sale syncs with the rest.

Germany is different

Where fiscalisation applies, orders and payments are blocked offline rather than queued:

Fiscalization requires internet. Orders and payments are blocked while offline.

This is not a limitation we chose. A fiscally signed receipt cannot be produced without reaching the signing service, and issuing an unsigned one would be the actual compliance failure. See Fiscal and TSE (Germany).

Sync your device before you need it

Settings → This device → Sync menu & device data downloads the latest catalog, receipt layouts, tables, printers and offline caches. The important part is what it does on failure:

Existing data is kept if sync fails or you are offline.

So a failed sync never leaves a device with a half-menu. It tells you which it is — Menu and device data updated, Synced with some warnings, or Could not sync. Your cached menu was not changed. — and shows when the menu and the receipt layouts were each last synced.

Watch for this one in particular:

Receipt layouts not synced yet — Sync now before printing offline

A device that has never synced layouts cannot print the right receipt while offline. Sync a new device once, on purpose, before its first shift.

When an order will not sync

Queued orders retry on their own when the connection returns. One that still cannot be accepted lands in the Sync failed filter on the Orders screen, with a count badge, and individual rows say Sync failed — see Sync failed filter.

Open the order and choose:

• Retry without changes — the usual fix once whatever blocked it is gone.
• Discard local order — for one that should never have existed.

Read the discard warning before tapping it:

This permanently removes the unsynced order from this device. It was never uploaded to the server.

There is nothing to recover afterwards, because the order only ever existed on that device. If the order is real and you simply cannot get it to sync, leave it in the queue and ask for help rather than discarding it — the items, the table and the payment are all still in there.

A practical habit

Two minutes at opening saves an hour of guessing later: sync each device, confirm each till’s shift is open on the device that holds its drawer, and print one test receipt. The rest of the day then survives the Wi-Fi going out without anyone having to think about it.