The IRP EPOS is web-based software and requires an Internet connection to the IRP server to pull back live stock information and record sales. As such, it is extremely important to have an 'offline' contingency plan in place in the unlikely event of an internet or server outage and downtime.
This contingency plan must allow you to:
- Manually take orders and provide receipts.
- Re-key manual orders back into your IRP till to correct finance reporting and stock.
Requirements for these are highlighted below.
Manually take orders and provide receipts
To perform this function, we recommend keeping a number of standard or customised Carbon Receipt or Invoice books such as this one.
This will allow you to manually note down the order and provide a receipt to your customer.
To be able to rekey these orders back into the IRP, it is important to record one order per sheet (not just a list of stock items). This will allow orders to be correctly grouped when re-keyed.
On each sheet it is essential to record the following information:
- Customer Email (optional - to be able to email receipt later and add to mailing list)
- Date
- Line Items with a unique stock identifier (e.g. IRP Stock ID, EAN, PARTCODE)
- Sub Total
- Discount
- Total
- Payment Method(s) and respective transacted amounts
Re-key manual orders back into your IRP till to correct finance reporting and stock
If you have recorded orders with the above information, you’ll be able to log into your IRP EPOS Till at the end of the outage and re-key your manual orders as new sales. This will ensure stock and financial information is restored correctly.
It is recommended at this stage that captured email addresses are entered and receipts sent to customers.
This completes the EPOS outage contingency plan.
It goes without saying, if you have a primary and secondary internet connection installed in your business premises as per the EPOS Till Features & Requirements, the necessity for such a manual contingency should, in practice, be completely negated. This assumption does not however refute the need for best-practice business contingency planning.
