This article explains how you can capture orders in the Onsight mobile app when you are offline, and how those orders later sync through into QuickBooks Online once you are back online.
Overview of how we send orders to QuickBooks when offline
Onsight is designed for outside sales teams who need to take orders on the road, even when they have poor reception or even no connectivity at all.
The typical flow is:
- A sales rep creates an order in Onsight while offline.
- The order is saved on the mobile device.
- When the device goes online again, the order syncs to the Onsight server.
- After the order reaches the Onsight server, it is synced to QuickBooks via the Onsight QuickBooks connector.
This means your sales reps can keep selling without waiting for a signal, and your office team can process orders in QuickBooks as soon as connectivity is established and the sync completes.
What “offline mode” means in Onsight
When you are offline, the Onsight mobile app cannot talk to the Onsight server, and it cannot talk to QuickBooks.
Instead, Onsight uses offline technology to keep the app working:
- Your product catalogue, pricing, customers, and stock on hand are all downloaded to the device in advance
- Orders and quotes created offline are stored locally on the device
- A sync process sends the stored order to the server once connectivity returns
In other words, offline mode means that the app uses a local copy of your data so you can keep working.
How to ensure reliable data for offline work
When you log in for the first time, depending on how many products and customers need to be synced, the data sync can take a few minutes. For subsequent logins, the system will not do a full sync but will only update changes that were recently made on your account. This will only take a few seconds. So, when you log into the app and you have a stable internet connection, all your data will become up to date.
Data can only sync when you are online. Your data will sync automatically but if you want to make sure your product and customer data is up to date, you can manually sync you data. If you know you are heading into an area with poor coverage, we recommend that you manually sync your data before you go offline. Also, to reliably send orders to QuickBooks later, you should manually sync before you head out for sales visits for the day.
To manually trigger a sync:
- Tap the back button until you can see the hamburger icon (3 horizontal lines).
- Tap the hamburger icon and then tap ‘Sync data’.
- Depending how big the changes are in the database, the sync can take a few seconds or a few minutes.
Or you can just log out and log back in again to achieve the same thing.
Product and customer updates will sync automatically to your device. This includes:
- New products
- Updates to existing products
- Updated product prices
- Stock updates
- New customers
- Updates to existing customers
How to capture an order when you are offline
You can create a sales order in the Onsight app while you are offline. The process is the same as when you are online.
- Tap Customers and select the customer you want to create the order for.
- Tap Products, browse your catalogue, and tap the + button to add items to your cart.
- Tap the cart icon to review the draft order.
- From the draft order screen, you can create the order quickly by tapping Create Order.
- Alternatively, you can add more details by tapping Next and stepping through options like fees, payment method, delivery address, delivery date, contact person, sales rep, and customer signature, and then tapping Create Order.
If you are offline, the order will be saved on your device and will sync as soon as you are online again. After syncing, you will receive an email containing the order PDF.
How the offline orders get sent to QuickBooks once you are back online
When your device reconnects, syncing happens in two stages.
Stage 1: Mobile device to Onsight server
As soon as the app detects you are online, it uploads any offline changes, including:
- Orders created while offline
- Quotes created while offline
- New customers created while offline
At this point, the order is safely on the Onsight server.
Stage 2: Onsight server to QuickBooks
Once the order is on the Onsight server, the Onsight QuickBooks connector sends it into QuickBooks. By default, Onsight sales orders are sent to QuickBooks as estimates in the ‘Accepted’ state, and Onsight quotes are sent as estimates in the ‘Pending’ state. After fulfilling the order, you can convert it into an invoice in QuickBooks and send it to your customer.
This two-stage design is important. It means your mobile device does not need a direct connection to QuickBooks while you are on the road. It only needs to reconnect long enough to sync to the Onsight server.