The terminal stops working: your outage game plan

Friday, five o'clock. The terminal shows a network error, there are six people in line, and the question is simple: do we keep selling?

The answer depends on a setting you have probably left at its default, and on a plan most businesses have never written down. Both take about half an hour to sort out on a quiet day.

What offline mode does, and what it doesn't

When a Clover device loses its connection, it can still record the payment. But it is important to understand what is happening: the device cannot reach the payment gateway, so it cannot verify that the card is valid or that funds are available.

The payment is queued on the device and sent as soon as connectivity returns. Only then is it genuinely authorized, or declined. A payment accepted offline can therefore be declined later, and the customer has already left with the goods.

Offline mode does not transfer the risk to someone else. It lets you keep selling while you personally carry the chance that the payment never clears.

Settings to adjust now, not during the outage

By default, Clover Mini and Clover Flex are configured to take offline payments for a period of up to seven days. You have three choices, and the right one depends on your average ticket.

• Accept everything offline: you lose no sales, but you carry the whole risk.
• Decline everything offline: your risk is nil, but you lose sales during the outage.
• Accept with limits: you can cap the amount of a single offline transaction and the total processed while offline.

The third option suits most businesses. The reasoning is concrete: how much are you willing to lose, once, without it hurting? A café and an auto shop will obviously land on different numbers.

Make this setting on every device, and write it down. It is a business decision, not a technical parameter.

Tell the three kinds of outage apart

Before panicking, work out which of the three you are facing, because the response differs.

If it is your internet connection, everything drops at once: register, terminal, internet phone, music. Restart the router, then check whether a device with a cellular connection, a Clover Flex for instance, is still working. That is often your spare tire.

If it is one particular device, the others keep working. Check its network settings and wireless connection, then restart it. A device that lost its wireless network after a power cut is a classic.

If it is the service itself, nothing you do on site will change anything. Clover publishes a status page for its services: bookmark it today, because hunting for it mid-outage is exactly when you won't find it.

The written plan, in five lines

An outage plan fits on a sheet taped under the counter. It should answer five questions, and any employee should be able to follow it without calling you.

• Who restarts the router, and where is it?
• Which device has a cellular connection as backup?
• Up to what amount do we accept an offline sale, and what do we tell the customer above it?
• How do we record sales made during the outage so they can be reconciled afterward?
• Who do we call, at what number, when none of the above works?

After the outage: the part everyone forgets

When connectivity returns, the queued payments go out for processing. Some will clear, some won't. Don't treat the day as closed until you have checked the result of each one.

Compare the offline sales you wrote down by hand against what shows up in your reports. This is also the moment to confirm the day's batch actually closed: an evening outage can cause the automatic closeout to be missed, and a missed closeout pushes everything back.

Do one thing this week: open the offline payment settings on every device, decide on a cap you could absorb, and write the five-line plan. The outage will happen on a Friday evening, never on a Tuesday morning.