Guide · the outage

Net band. Billing chalu. — what actually happens.

Nothing stops. The register bills from the laptop's own database, so orders, KOTs, prints and settles carry on exactly as before — no spinner, no error message, no modal to dismiss. One line at the foot of the screen changes wording. The bills queue locally and upload themselves the moment the connection returns, and you do not have to do anything.

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Rather see it than read it? Try the offline simulator on the home page — flip the internet off and watch the counter carry on.

8:40 pm, the fibre dies

What keeps working — the honest list.

Opening tables and punching orders. The menu is already on the laptop. Search, categories, Half/Full portions, add-ons, line notes — all local, all the same speed as ten minutes ago.
Firing KOTs. The kitchen printer sits on your own network or on a cable. A ticket has no reason to travel the internet to cross a kitchen, and it doesn't.
Settling and printing. Cash, UPI or card marking, part payment, the change calculation, the cash drawer, and the printed GST bill with its invoice number — the whole close of a table.
Staff PINs and manager approvals. PINs come from the dashboard but they work offline, so a discount or a void that needs a manager still gets one, and still gets stamped with who approved it.
Reprints. Last receipt, last KOT, or any settled order from the cart — stamped DUPLICATE, exactly as when the line is up.

EasyKOT register mid-service: Table T4's cart lines marked as Sent 11:16 to the kitchen under the KOT fired ✓ key

The register during service. With the connection down this screen is identical — only the status line at the foot of the left rail changes its wording.

The other half of the honesty

What does need internet.

Signing up, and the one-time code that links a new register to your store. Both are day-one jobs, not service-time jobs.
Sync — sending today's sales up and pulling menu changes down. It is background work, and it catches up on its own.
The owner dashboard. Reports, menu edits, staff and device management all live on the web, so an outage means you cannot change the menu until it is back. The till carries on selling the menu it already has.

Notice what is not on that list: nothing between a guest sitting down and a bill in their hand. That is the whole design — the counter is never on the network's critical path.

The screen

An offline badge, not an error.

Online, the rail foot reads "Online · all synced" with a green dot.
Offline, it reads "Offline · sales keep working" with a grey one. That is the entire visible change. No red banner, no modal, no "retry connection" you have to dismiss before you can take money.
The colour never carries it alone — the words say the state too, because a status you can only see if you can distinguish green from grey is a status a busy cashier will miss.
The refresh glyph beside it goes quiet. Hover it while you are down and it says "No network — sales still work offline; sync when back online". It is a nice-to-have for pulling a menu change early, never something you have to press.

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The bills

Where they go while you are down.

Onto the laptop's own database, which is where they were going anyway. Uploading is a separate, later job — so "offline" changes when your dashboard finds out about a sale, never whether the sale happened.

Written as they happen, line by line, not held in memory until something saves. Close the lid, lose the power — the day is on disk.
Append-only. Every order and payment is a ledger row; nothing is overwritten. A correction is a new row that explains itself, which is why the day-end still adds up after a messy evening.
Invoice numbers keep coming from the till's own series, so the paper you hand a guest at 9 pm is a properly numbered tax invoice, not a placeholder to be fixed later. The first-GST-bill guide covers how that series is built.
Every write carries its own id. When the upload finally runs and a request gets retried, the same bill cannot land twice.

A real GST bill rendered by a virtual ESC/POS printer fed by the register's own print bytes, printed with the internet down: Spice Route Kitchen, DINE IN, Bill T1/2627/00005, Dated 04/09/2026, Order T1-003, Table T2, item lines, Subtotal Rs.310.00, CGST Rs.7.75, SGST Rs.7.75, TOTAL Rs.325.50, Paid Rs.325.50

This is what prints while you are offline — the same numbered GST bill, CGST and SGST split, that prints when the line is up. Rendered here by a virtual ESC/POS printer — the exact bytes the register sends, not a photo of paper.

EasyKOT Settings, Printers and KDS: a counter receipt printer and a kitchen KOT printer with their roles, Test print and Test connection buttons, and a Reliability row showing a failed job with Reprint last receipt and Reprint last KOT

The other failure

If the printer drops too.

An outage is rarely tidy — the router reboots, someone unplugs the printer to charge a phone, the paper runs out. None of it costs you the sale, because settling writes the ledger first and the paper second.

The ticket becomes a job, not a dialog. It waits in a queue on the laptop and retries on its own — after 5 seconds, then 15, then 45, then every 45 — and drains itself the moment the printer answers. Nobody has to press anything.
The rail tells you. "Printer ✕" when a configured printer stops answering, "No printer · 3 waiting" on a till that has none set up, and "· 2 failed" appended when tickets have actually failed.
Settings shows the same count as an "N failed" pill under Reliability, with Reprint last receipt and Reprint last KOT next to it — the screenshot above. That is your manual override when you do not want to wait for the retry.
The drawer failing does not undo the settle either. The register says the receipt or drawer could not be queued and tells you the sale still stands, with the reprint waiting in Orders.

A network printer needs your Wi-Fi or LAN, not your internet connection. If the fibre is dead but the router is alive, the counter printer and the kitchen printer never notice. Symptom by symptom: when the printer is not printing.

Phones and the pass

Wi-Fi is not internet — and that decides everything.

This is the distinction most owners get wrong on the phone to their ISP, and it is the one that decides how an outage actually feels on the floor. Your router can be perfectly healthy while the line to the outside world is dead — and everything inside the shop runs on the router.

Router alive, internet dead. The captain phones reach the till over the shop's own Wi-Fi in one hop, the round is acknowledged, the KOT prints and the kitchen screen updates. Service does not change.
Internet alive, phone off the shop Wi-Fi. The round goes the long way round — up to the server and back down to the printing till — and arrives in a few seconds instead of instantly.
Neither. The round is held on the phone, both sides keep retrying, and the app says so in words a waiter can act on: "The register hasn't got this. Stay on the restaurant Wi-Fi, or tell the kitchen." A fired round stays badged until the register confirms it.
Power cut. The one outage that genuinely stops a laptop-and-router setup — but the register comes back to the same tables, the same open checks and the same numbers, since none of it was living in the cloud.

Setting the phones up is its own short job: pairing the captain app to the register — they talk over your own Wi-Fi by design. The kitchen display is on the same network for the same reason.

Later that night

When the connection comes back.

Nobody presses anything. The register notices the line is back and starts uploading in the background, while the counter carries on billing on top of it.
The status line flips to "Online · all synced". That is your confirmation the queue has drained — the same line that told you it was down.
The dashboard fills in. Every bill you rang during the outage appears with the time it was actually taken, not the time it uploaded, so the evening reads correctly in reports.
Menu changes come down the same way. If you edited a price on your phone while the shop was offline, the till picks it up on the next sync — or immediately, if you tap the refresh glyph beside the status line.

Proof, not a promise

Close the tab. Reopen it. Your table is still there.

The claim on this page is testable in about ninety seconds, and you do not need an account, an install or a printer to test it.

Open the live demo and drive the real register in your browser — it runs on a laptop-size screen, with a sample restaurant already loaded.
Open a table, punch a couple of dishes and fire the KOT.
Now close the browser tab completely — or pull your Wi-Fi, or switch to flight mode.
Reopen it. The table, the lines and the fired round are exactly where you left them, because they were never anywhere else.

That persistence is deliberate. Plenty of software demos wipe themselves on refresh to look tidy. This one keeps your table on purpose — the demo runs the same local-first storage the real register runs, so a refresh is the shortest honest demonstration of what an outage does to your data. For the ten-second version, the home page's offline simulator lets you flip the internet off and watch the counter carry on.

Printing and multi-terminal are the two things a browser cannot do — those need the desktop register.

Outage questions

Straight answers.

Does EasyKOT work without internet?

Yes, and not in a reduced mode. The register keeps its own database on the laptop and that database is the source of truth, so punching orders, firing KOTs, printing and settling all run locally. The screen never waits on the network — the only visible change is the status line at the foot of the left rail, which reads 'Offline · sales keep working' instead of 'Online · all synced'.

How long can I keep billing offline?

There is no offline timer to run out. Nothing on the sell path asks the internet for permission, so an hour, an evening or a week all behave the same — the bills simply accumulate on the laptop. The longer you are down the bigger the batch that uploads later, and it still uploads by itself when the line returns.

Will I lose data if the laptop shuts down while it is offline?

No. Orders and payments are written to the laptop's own database as they happen, not held in memory until something saves — and they are written as an append-only ledger, so a power cut can interrupt the day but cannot rewrite what was already rung up. Reopen the register and the tables are where you left them.

Do the waiters' phones work when the internet is down?

Yes, as long as the phones and the till are on the same restaurant Wi-Fi — internet and Wi-Fi are two different things, and this is the distinction that decides the answer. On the store's own network the captain phone reaches the till in one hop, the KOT prints and the kitchen screen updates. If the router itself is dead, the round is held on the phone and the app says so plainly rather than pretending it went through.

Will GST bill numbering stay continuous if I bill through an outage?

Yes. Each till issues its own consecutive series — T1/2627/00001, T2/2627/00001 — and allocates it on the till itself at bill print or settle. Two registers can bill through the same outage with no coordination and no collision, and Rule 46 expressly permits multiple series.

Internet nahi hai toh KOT kitchen tak jayega?

Haan. The kitchen printer is on your own network or cable, not on the internet, so a fired KOT reaches it exactly as it always does. If the printer itself is off or out of paper, the sale is still recorded and the ticket waits in a queue that retries on its own until it prints.

How do I know when everything has synced?

The same status line tells you: it flips back to 'Online · all synced' by itself once the upload has drained. There is no button to press — the refresh glyph beside it is only for pulling a menu change early, and while you are offline it is disabled with the note 'No network — sales still work offline; sync when back online'.

The commercial case for an offline-first register lives on the billing register page. Every guide in the cluster is listed on the guides hub.

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3 mahine chalao, phir paisa lagao.

Three months free, full product, no card. Made in India, for the counter — built inside a running restaurant.