How does the offline mode actually work?

smartPOS Cloud runs on a local database on your terminal. Sales, inventory updates, and kitchen orders are processed and stored on-device the moment they happen - no waiting on a network round-trip. Once your connection returns, everything syncs to the cloud automatically, in the order it happened.

Can I link my kitchen screens to multiple POS terminals?

Yes. The Kitchen Display System routes tickets by station, so orders from any linked POS terminal reach the right screen, color-coded by urgency.

How does smartPOS Central sync with my on-premise setup?

smartPOS Central reads the same synced data as your web ERP. Once your terminal syncs to the cloud, real-time sales, stock alerts, and staff activity are reflected in the app.

What does smartPOS Cloud cost?

Plans are sized to how many terminals and locations you run. Book a demo and we'll walk you through the plan that fits your business.

What Is an Offline-First ERP (and Why Hospitality & Retail Businesses Need One)

"ERP" (enterprise resource planning) is a term that usually gets attached to large, expensive enterprise software. For a restaurant, bar, hotel, or retail business, the more useful way to think about it is simpler: it is the difference between buying a till and buying a system that runs the whole operation.

Point of sale alone is not the whole business

A point-of-sale system answers one question: how do I take a sale. That is necessary, but it is not the same as running a business. Behind every sale sits a set of other questions a POS-only tool does not answer: what does this sale do to your stock levels across every location, does it post correctly into your books, does the kitchen know what to make, and if you run rooms, does it update occupancy and billing.

Businesses that buy a POS-only tool typically end up buying two or three more tools to cover the rest, and then spend time and money getting those tools to talk to each other, if they can at all. An ERP approach instead treats sales, inventory, accounting, kitchen operations, and (for hospitality) accommodation as one connected system from the start.

What "offline-first" adds to that picture

Most ERP and POS software assumes a constant internet connection, because most of it was built for markets where that assumption mostly holds. Offline-first flips that assumption: every module, not only the till, is built to keep functioning fully on-device, and to sync back to the cloud once a connection is available.

That distinction matters more the more modules you add. A POS that works offline but relies on a live connection to check inventory levels or post to accounting is only partially offline-first. A genuinely offline-first ERP keeps all of those functions working locally, so an outage does not create a gap between what the till says happened and what your books, stock levels, or kitchen actually reflect.

What this looks like module by module

An offline-first ERP for hospitality and retail typically needs to cover:

Sales & billing - multi-currency pricing, split bills, and receipt printing that work without a live connection.
Inventory & multi-warehouse management - stock depletion at the point of sale, and transfers or reorder points across locations, tracked accurately even when a branch is temporarily offline.
Kitchen display systems - order routing to the right station, with urgency and status that update instantly at the till, not after a round trip to a server.
Accommodation & front desk - reservation calendars, check-in and check-out billing, and folio management for hotels, motels, and guest houses.
Double-entry accounting - every sale posting straight into a real chart of accounts, so profit and loss and balance sheet reporting reflect reality without manual reconciliation.

This is the module set smartPOS Cloud is built around, with each one running local-first and syncing automatically once connectivity returns.

Why this is the right frame for evaluating software, not just a feature

If you are comparing systems, "does it have offline mode" is the wrong question, because almost every vendor will say yes to some version of it. The better question is "which parts of the business keep running correctly if the internet is down for an hour, or a day." For a POS-only tool, the honest answer is usually just the till, and sometimes not even that. For a genuinely offline-first ERP, the answer should be all of it: sales, stock, kitchen, accounting, and accommodation, staying in sync with reality regardless of connectivity, and syncing back to the cloud the moment it returns.