The distinction
One of these is a reading room. One is a workshop.
If you only ever tested it by opening a job you'd already loaded, you'd never notice the difference. You notice it the first time you try to create something underground.
Lets you read
Whatever you happened to open before you lost signal is still on screen. That's genuinely useful, and it's where most “offline” claims stop.
- Re-read a loaded page
- Issue a certificate
- Create a customer
- Open a record you didn't visit first
Lets you write
Every change you make underground is recorded as an operation, stored durably on the device, and replayed in order when a connection comes back. Nothing waits for you to remember it. Nothing is re-keyed.
- Complete and issue a certificate — the whole form, any of the 39 types
- Take proof photographs of the job
- Capture the customer's signature on the device
- Create a new customer or property, there and then
- Open the day's appointments, and the history behind each
- Decode a GC number's manufacturer, no lookup, no network
And you aren't limited to the record you happened to open last: customers, properties, appointments, certificates and job conditions are all held on the device.
One Tuesday
Four hours underground, then thirty seconds of catching up
A commercial plant room in the morning, a rural property after lunch. Nobody pressed anything.
What's on the device
Six local stores, not one cached page
Which is why you can open a property you've never visited on this phone, and why the queue has somewhere to write to.
- CustomersNames, contacts, account history
- PropertiesAddresses, appliances, access notes
- AppointmentsThe day, and what each visit is for
- CertificatesIssued, in progress, and superseded
- Job conditionsWhat was found, on site, per visit
- The write queueEvery change you made, in order, durable
The first five let you work. The sixth is the one nobody else has, and it's the reason the other five aren't just a nicer way to re-read yesterday.
The engineering
Eight problems that break offline software
Each of these has a deliberate answer in OnPoint, and each one is work you only do after being burned by it. This is the densest section on the page on purpose.
- 01
The app going into your pocket doesn't lose the upload
When a phone backgrounds, the browser engine suspends in-flight uploads and timers alike. That's how “saving…” ends up frozen on screen until you reopen the app — and how a photo goes missing.
OnPoint watches for it: if the app is already backgrounded it doesn't start the upload, and if it backgrounds mid-upload the attempt bails out immediately. The file is stored durably either way and finishes on its own when you come back.
- 02
Work created offline keeps its identity
A customer added in a basement doesn't exist on the server yet, so it gets a temporary identity locally — and when it syncs, everything that pointed at the temporary one is repointed at the real one. Edit that customer an hour later and it's the same record, not a duplicate.
- 03
A stuck sync can't wedge the app
Every operation has its own timeout, and a watchdog force-releases the sync if a whole run overruns anyway. Each run is tagged, so a stale run that wakes up late steps aside instead of processing everything twice.
- 04
Failures that can never succeed stop retrying
A retry loop that runs forever is worse than a clean failure. Operations that cannot ever complete are recognised and set aside rather than hammering a connection every two minutes for the rest of the week.
- 05
It syncs the moment you save, not on a timer
Saving triggers a drain immediately. If one is already running, the trigger is remembered and runs after — it's never silently dropped, which is the failure that makes people distrust a sync indicator.
- 06
Deletions reach the van
Delete a record at the office and it disappears from the engineer's phone. That's harder than it sounds:
- —the delete leaves no marker to sync
- —the incremental fetch is a moving window that scrolls past it
- —the security rules hide deleted rows, so you cannot even ask which ones went
So OnPoint compares against the live set instead of waiting to be told.
- 07
What's stored on the device is encrypted
Session credentials held locally are encrypted at rest, rather than left in plain text for anyone who picks the phone up off a van seat.
- 08
First login doesn't stampede
Pulling every table at once on a fresh login saturated the connection at exactly the moment the dashboard needed it, and produced timeouts. The initial syncs are staggered, so the first thing you see is the app rather than a spinner.
We're not going to claim conflict-free merging. Two people editing the same record offline is a genuinely hard problem and we won't pretend it's solved.
No storage sizes, no “30 days of data”, no sync speeds. Those numbers depend on your phone and your round, so quoting ours would be theatre.
And “encrypted at rest” means the session credentials on the device — a narrower claim than end-to-end, and a true one.
What still needs signal
Five things that don't happen underground
All of it queues or waits, and none of it blocks the work in front of you. But a page this specific about everything else would lose the argument by fudging this.
Reading a plate or analyser
Photograph it underground; the extraction runs when you're back. How that works.
Voice job reports
Dictation needs a connection. Typed notes go through the same structuring later.
Card payments
Taking money needs the network, so the invoice waits with everything else.
Sending to a customer
The certificate is issued offline; it reaches their portal on sync.
Live tracking
An ETA the customer can watch needs a connection at both ends.
The one exception
Decoding a Gas Council number's manufacturer runs on the device. It's arithmetic on the digits you typed rather than a request to anywhere, so it answers in a plant room with no bars — including for a GC number the system has never seen before.
Straight answers
Nine, including where it stops.
01Can I issue a certificate with no signal?
Yes — the whole form, any of the 39 types, with validation running on the device so a blocking issue is caught in the plant room rather than on upload. See the certificate range.
02Do I have to press sync?
No. The queue drains on its own the moment there's a connection, and saving triggers a drain immediately rather than waiting for a timer. There's no button to remember.
03What if I close the app before it syncs?
The work is stored durably on the device, not held in memory. It's still there when you reopen, and it finishes then.
04What if the phone backgrounds mid-upload?
The attempt bails out immediately and the queue finishes it on resume — the file isn't lost. Browser engines suspend in-flight uploads when an app backgrounds, which is what leaves “saving…” frozen on screen in other software; OnPoint watches for it and doesn't start an upload while backgrounded at all.
05Can I add a new customer offline?
Yes, along with a new property. It gets a temporary identity on the device, and when it syncs everything that pointed at the temporary one is repointed at the real record — so editing it an hour later doesn't create a duplicate.
06Does it work on Android as well as iPhone?
Yes, both — and it's the same app on each, not a reduced version on one of them.
07What still needs a connection?
Reading a data plate or an analyser from a photo, voice job reports, card payments, sending anything to a customer, and live tracking. All of it queues or waits rather than blocking the work in front of you. The GC manufacturer decode is the exception — that runs on the device.
08Is my data safe on the device?
Session credentials held locally are encrypted at rest rather than stored in plain text. That's a narrower claim than end-to-end encryption, and it's the one we can actually make.
09Is offline on every plan?
Yes. £19 for the first seat, £9 for each after, with everything included — there's no higher tier to move up to. See pricing.
Test it in airplane mode.
14 days free, no card. Turn the signal off, complete a certificate, add a customer, take a signature — then turn it back on and watch the queue empty itself. That's the whole evaluation.
Email us
support@onpointbusiness.co.ukCall us
+44 7884 697405On every plan
£19 + £9 a seat · no higher tier