Changes made offline: when they reach the office
By the end of this article you’ll know exactly what happens to a status change, a photo or a new job you make with no signal — where it sits, when it goes, and what the office gets.
Where offline work lives
Everything you do without a connection is written to the phone first. The job reads completed, the customer is in Find, the photo is on the job — for you, it’s done. What’s left is delivery: a queue on the phone of changes the office hasn’t seen yet. The bar counts that queue as 2 pending; You → Sync Now shows the same count.
The phone keeps that queue through closing the app, restarting the phone, days in a dead zone. A dropped connection in the middle of a sync loses nothing either — what didn’t get through stays pending.
When the app sends it
You don’t have to send anything. A sync runs at five moments:
- When a signal comes back after being offline — straight away.
- When you open the app, or bring it back from the background.
- Every five minutes while the app is open and online.
- After a sync that delivered changes, one more follows, so anything the office did in response comes down at once.
- When you tap You → Sync Now.
While it runs the bar reads Syncing…. When it delivers work from your phone a toast says Synced 2 changes; a sync that only downloaded stays silent. If the phone is online but the office can’t be reached, the bar reads Sync error and the app retries by itself — a few seconds later, then progressively less often, never more than five minutes apart.
What the office sees
Changes that carry a time of their own — a skipped stop, a signed quote, a clock-in or clock-out, a cash payment — keep the moment you tapped, not the moment they were sent. A quote signed at 3:10 in a basement and synced at 4:45 in the truck reads signed at 3:10 in the office.
Where a change is really a message — sending a quote, emailing an invoice, asking for a review — the phone doesn’t send the email itself. It tells the office “this quote is now sent”, and the office sends the email when your sync arrives. That’s why the quote reads Queued — it will send when you have signal. rather than pretending it went, and why sending it twice offline never emails the customer twice.
Photos and prices
Photos travel separately from everything else because they’re large: they upload in the background, one at a time, and never hold up a status change or a note. A photo taken offline says Saved. It’ll upload when you reconnect. — you can move on to the next job.
Prices set offline are estimates from the price list your phone last downloaded. A quote or a job’s services carry an Estimate badge until the office confirms them with its own list; the invoice follows the office’s figures.
What “pending” counts
The number is every unsent thing on the phone, not just jobs: status changes, notes, photos waiting to upload, invoices you built, signed quote acceptances, receipts, cash or check payments, expenses, time clock entries, time-off requests. One completed job with three photos can read 4 pending — that’s four items, not four jobs.
When the office says no
Most changes are accepted as they are. Now and then the office’s rules refuse one — the job was reassigned while you were offline, a service was retired, someone else claimed the open job first. The phone takes the office’s version, and the bar shows a red 1 to review badge that opens a plain-language reason. Nothing is dropped silently, and a refused payment gets its own louder handling. See When the office changed the same thing.
Good to know
- A customer you added offline carries a Saved on this device, not yet sent. badge on their page until the sync goes through. Everything on the page still works.
- The queue belongs to this phone and this company. Switch company under You and each company’s pending work waits separately; switch back and it’s still there.
- After a week with no connection at all, the phone clears its downloaded data — including the queue. You get a red warning banner for the last two days if anything is pending. See Sync problems.