Participants felt that in some situations an Offline POS becomes necessary for an organization’s to cater to the needs of its customers.
However there are no solutions available directly on ERPNext. Or with the community.
Therefore an organization would be served best to try and avoid a Offline POS requirement by trying to fix internet connections. Wireless Internet, Satellite Internet and 4G/5G networks are all worth exploring.
Where an offline POS is absolutely required:
Local instance of ERPNext at the retail location is perhaps the best option. But that will require local infrastructure and IT support. Plus consolidating transactions is a bother and will have to be done manually. Or customization done. What’s optimal is for somebody to work on Event Streaming (a feature that’s been released on ERPNext but people haven’t been able to make it work for them) and finish the work that seems to be almost there. But even when a solution (like Event Streaming) is developed to address consolidation of transactions, local instances of ERPNext at each retail location will be too expensive and intense and only deployments of a certain size and beyond will be able to deploy this configuration.
An offline POS app that’s designed to address all security and operational design issues is what would be optimal. But such a solution does not exist and we can but hope that somebody would get inspired (or funded) to develop such an app.
Community members that have worked; or are working on; or are planning to address this Offline POS need are requested to collaborate, leverage existing code and work out a road map to help us get to one or more of the solutions outlined here.
Please join in on the discussions here. Or on the Telegram group.
Thanks
Jay