When the register goes offline — what survives, what doesn’t

Most retail POS vendors built around card-present transactions. When the internet drops, the card terminal can’t authorize, so the sale can’t happen. A Washington cannabis register is cash-first, so the payment itself doesn’t need the internet. What does need it is everything the system does around the payment: the purchase-limit and ID checks the server runs, the inventory decrement, the books and the state traceability record.

CannAgent’s register runs in the browser on the register tablet. When the tablet loses its network, it shows an Offline banner and keeps working for cash sales, within limits. If the internet is down but the store Wi-Fi is up, the tablet may not know it is offline: sales still queue, but no banner shows, and you reload the register once the internet is back so they send.

• Product lookup from what the tablet has already cached: the top sellers and searches it has run in the last day. A product it has never loaded may not come up.
• Build the cart and take cash.
• Save the sale on the tablet. It is queued in the tablet’s browser storage, and the Offline banner shows how many sales are waiting to send.
• Print a receipt and open the drawer if the printer is connected to the register directly. Where the printer is cloud-connected, the receipt and the drawer kick both wait for the connection. No Sale needs the connection too, so open the drawer by hand.

Honest list. These all happen when the queued sale is sent, not at the counter.

• The checks the server runs on every sale: purchase limits, the date-of-birth re-check and medical card rules. Some products the register already knows about are refused at the counter even offline, such as a medical-only product for a customer who is not a patient. The rest are checked when the sale is sent.
• The inventory decrement and the books.
• WSLCB-CCRS traceability. WAC 314-55-083(4) requires the information be “kept completely up-to-date” and sets no interval: no real-time rule, no stated deadline. Queued sales reach the traceability record after they are sent and recorded; the receive timestamp is what matters, not whether the row crossed the wire instantly. (End-of-day reconciliation is the practical bar we hold ourselves to, and the 2026 CCRS technical guide is the place to check the transport contract.)
• Loyalty points. The offline receipt shows no points earned, because the points ledger is on the server.
• Text and email receipts.
• Online-order pickup status. You can hand over the order; it is marked picked up when the queued sale is sent.
• The owner and manager dashboards, which show what the system had recorded before the connection dropped.

When the tablet sees its network come back, the banner switches to syncing and the register sends the queued sales, oldest first. If it never showed the Offline banner, or a send stalled, reload the register to start sending.

1. 1Each queued sale goes through the same checks a live sale does, and is recorded if it passes.
2. 2A sale the server refuses, for example one over a purchase limit or one that fails the date-of-birth re-check, is held: the register shows a held-sale badge, and the sale lands in Offline Reconcile for a manager to resolve. By then the product has already left the store, so the manager decides how to record it.
3. 3A sale that fails for a temporary reason, like a server error, stays in the queue and is tried again.

The customer doesn’t need to hear ‘our system is down.’ They need to hear what happens with their purchase, accurately.

• Right: ‘Cash sale, no problem. Our connection is slow, so your receipt is printed but the system catches up in a bit.’
• Right (loyalty member): ‘Your points will post once our connection is back.’ (The offline receipt won’t show them.)
• Right (online order): ‘I can hand it to you now; we’ll mark it picked up once we’re back online.’
• Wrong: ‘Our system is down, I’m not sure I can ring you up.’ (For a cash sale, the register can usually still take it.)
• Wrong: ‘Your points are already on your account.’ (They aren’t yet.)

• Can the register take a cash sale with no connection, and where is that sale stored until it is sent?
• Which checks run at the counter offline, and which only run when the sale is sent?
• What happens to a queued sale the server refuses? Is it held for a person, or dropped?
• How does a manager see that every register has emptied its queue?