Offline mode

Sometimes, the school network/server may have issues prohibiting the Point of Sale from communicating with the Fusion Data Server. To alleviate these issues, Fusion provides an Offline mode which allows you to record sales locally on the Point of Sale. When the issues are resolved, these transactions will be uploaded to the server so sales are not lost and the users balance is correctly updated.

Things to consider

While offline mode is beneficial and allows you to continue service during network/server issues, there are some items that you need to be aware of:

1. No user balance: While in offline mode, the Point of Sale does not know what the user’s balance is, or what they may have spent on other tills. When the transaction is posted this will take the user overdrawn if they have spent more than they had available.
2. Spend limits: The user’s daily spend limit is cached on the Point of Sale, however, while in offline mode, the Point of Sale will not know about any transactions that may have occurred at other locations, so the spend limit will only be enforced for transactions occurring at that till. For example, if a student has a £5 daily limit, they will not be able to spend more than this on a given PoS unit, however, they could easily circumvent this limit by spending up to £5 at each Point of Sale. Again, all transactions will be synchronised when the tills go back online, and the user will go overdrawn if they don’t have the credit to cover all these transactions.
3. Allowance transactions: When the transactions are synchronised, the system will replay the transactions at the date and time that they occurred. This means if the till was offline between 12 and 1pm and at this time the user should have been entitled to a Free School Meal allowance, this will be correctly factored in. However, if the transaction occurred at a time outside of the allowance time then the balance would be taken from their cashless balance. However, functionality exists to record transactions as having occurred at a specified date and time. See the section on Specifying a transaction time for more information.

!Due to the nature of how carry-over allowances are calculated, when running in offline, if transactions are not synchronised on the same day they occurred, this can mean that more allowance than intedended will be carried over. For example, if the FSM allowance is £2.00 and users are able to carry-over all the unspent allowance, if the user spends 50p while online, but then the tills go offline and they then spend a further £1. If these transactions are not uploaded before midnight when the allowance allocation process runs, then the system will not know about the £1 of offline sales and therefore add £1.50 to the carry-over purse.

4. Back up when offline for long periods: While in offline mode, all transactions are stored locally on the tills. If the data server is down for multiple days, it is highly recommended to back up the tills to protect against data loss. For example, we have had clients at the mercy of a ransomware attack so the data server is non-contactable for weeks. If a Point of Sale happens to suffer from data loss, then all the transactions held on this till will be lost. The transactions data is stored in C:\ProgramData\CRB Cunninghams\Impact\Data\Transaction.s3db