Offline first is an architecture, not a feature

Every field sales app in the world claims to work offline. Most of them mean that the last screen stays visible when the signal drops. The rep who has to book forty orders in a market with no coverage until the afternoon needs something different, and the difference is architectural.

What the phone has to hold

The day's route. The customer list with balances. Prices, discount charts and free-goods schemes, so the order is priced correctly without asking a server. And then everything the rep does: check-ins, orders, photos, forms, payments, returns, breaks. In Targets all of this lives in a database on the phone. Booking an order offline is the same screen and the same rules as booking one online.

The outbox

What most apps hide, Targets shows. An outbox lists each kind of record waiting to upload with a count: orders, check-ins, forms, new customers, deliveries, van unloads, close-day records, breaks. When the signal returns, it uploads on its own. A rep can also send any queue by hand and see it empty.

What comes down

Master data is refreshed by change date. A phone on a slow connection pulls only what changed since it last synced, not the whole price list. That matters more than it sounds in a town where the signal is one bar on a good day.

What arrives at the company

The same records, in the order they happened, timestamped from the phone. The manager's live map and the rep's day replay are built from them. A record that is rejected on upload is shown in the outbox, so it is fixed rather than lost.

Offline is not a mode the app falls into. It is the way the app works; online is when it happens to be able to tell someone.