The three constraints of trading without premises
A shop till sits on a counter, plugged into a wall, on broadband that has been there for years, and nearly all EPOS software is designed for exactly that. Trade from a field, a car park, a converted horsebox or a folding table and you are running the same software in conditions it was never tested in.
Signal is the one that actually breaks things. Livestock sheds, market halls with steel roofs, festival sites where twelve thousand people share one mast, farm shops at the end of a lane. Coverage there is not merely slow, it disappears and returns every few minutes.
Power is the one people underestimate. No sockets, and a screen at full brightness in daylight for seven hours. A tablet that lasts all day in the office will not last a full market.
Hands are the one nobody mentions. You are taking money, bagging goods, restocking the front of the table and answering a question, in the rain, wearing gloves. Anything that needs two hands and a moment's concentration will simply not be used.
Why cloud tills struggle on a pitch
Most modern EPOS is cloud software. The product list, the prices and the sales all live on a server, and the tablet is a window onto it. That design is excellent for a business with several sites and a manager who wants live figures. It has one assumption baked in: the connection is there.
When it is not, cloud tills behave in one of three ways, and it is worth knowing which yours does before you find out on a Saturday morning:
- It refuses to load at all. The worst case, and more common than you would expect if the app has been closed and needs to fetch itself again.
- It loads but will not complete a sale. You can browse products and then get an error at the payment step.
- It has a proper offline mode. Sales are stored on the device and uploaded when the signal returns. Several serious systems do this well.
The trouble is that offline mode is often a paid-tier feature, or works for sales but not for looking up a price, or caps how many sales it will hold. None of that is dishonest, but it is a set of edge cases you discover with a queue in front of you.
The alternative: a till that never needed the network
Mini Till is built the other way round. The till is not a window onto a server, it is the whole thing. Your products and your sales are stored in your browser's local storage on the device, and the code that runs the till is cached on the device the first time you open it.
The consequence is specific and worth spelling out. Once you have opened the till once with a connection, it will open and take sales with the phone in aeroplane mode, in a shed, in a field, with no bars at all. There is no offline mode to enable, no queue to worry about and no tier it sits behind, because there is no server for it to be cut off from in the first place.
Two practical touches follow. Add it to your home screen and it opens full screen like any other app, without a browser bar eating the top of a small display. And nothing waits on a network fetch: no fonts or frameworks pulled from elsewhere while the queue builds. It is up when you tap it.
The honest limit: an offline till does not give you offline card payments. Mini Till records that a sale was card or cash, but the money itself moves through your card reader and your payments provider, and that reader needs its own connection. If the signal is genuinely dead, you can keep ringing up and keep an accurate record, but you cannot take a card. Cash and a written IOU are still the only answers to that, and they always have been.
Setting up before you leave the house
Do all of this at home, on wifi, the night before. Turning up and setting up a till on a pitch with two bars is how a good day starts badly.
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Open the till once on the device you will trade with
That first load is what caches it. Do it on the actual phone or tablet, not on the laptop, because the cache and the data belong to that device and that browser.
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Add it to your home screen
Share, then Add to Home Screen. You now have an icon that opens full screen, and you are not hunting through tabs while somebody waits.
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Load your products and put the movers first
Everything you might sell, priced. Round prices are worth real money at a stall: £3.00 rather than £2.95 means fewer coins, faster change and a shorter queue.
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Send the list to your second device
If someone else is serving alongside you, Mini Till can share the product list as a link. Open it on their device and the same products land there, priced identically. Each device keeps its own sales.
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Test it in aeroplane mode
Turn the signal off and ring up a sale. Thirty seconds of testing at home, and you know exactly what will happen in the shed.
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Charge everything, and pack a power bank
A 10,000mAh bank will see a phone through a long market with room to spare. Turn the screen brightness down when you can, and set the screen timeout long enough that it is not locking between customers.
On the pitch
A few things that only matter when you are outdoors:
- Angle the screen away from the sun. Glare is the reason traders go back to a tin. A cheap stand that tilts solves it.
- A sandwich bag over the phone works. Touchscreens work through thin plastic, and it survives a shower better than a case does.
- Count the float in before you serve anyone. Write it down. Cashing up is impossible without it, and at a market you are cashing up in a van, in the dark, tired.
- Ring up everything. Including the trade you did with the stall opposite. An unrecorded sale becomes a variance you spend twenty minutes chasing.
- Watch the battery, not the clock. Plug into the bank at 40%, not at 8%.
The full sequence for taking payments and reconciling at the end of the day is set out in the till manual, and it applies just as much at a stall as behind a counter.
Cashing up in the van
The end of a market day is the worst possible time to do arithmetic, so keep it to three numbers. Count the cash, take off the float, and compare what is left against the till's cash figure for the day, which Mini Till shows split out from card and split payments.
Then match the card reader's own day total against the till's card figure. If they disagree, it is almost always a card sale taken on the reader that never got recorded on the till, which is exactly what happens when a queue builds. Note the difference rather than fudging it.
Before you drive off, export the day to CSV. It takes one tap, it needs no signal, and it means the day exists somewhere other than in one browser on one phone.
The backup habit that matters most: because the free till stores everything on your device, clearing your browser data deletes your products and your sales history. Download the backup file every week or two and keep it in cloud storage or emailed to yourself. It restores onto any device, which is also how you survive a dropped phone.
When you are running more than one pitch
Two stalls, or a stall and a van, changes the problem. Each device keeps its own sales, which is fine until you want one figure for the day and one stock count across both.
That is what the Pro stock system is for. Stock is held centrally and transferred out to each location, tills sign in against a location so their sales come off that location's stock, and takings are reported per pitch and per person. It is built for exactly the offline case: sales are written to the device first and queued, then pushed in batches when signal returns, and each sale carries an ID generated on the device so a retried upload is never counted twice.
It is £10 a month for a team of up to five people, and the till itself stays free whether you use it or not. There is a full demo on the stock page with several days of trade across three locations, and it needs no sign-up.
What this does not solve
Being straight about the gaps saves you a bad morning:
- Receipts print, but only through your browser. Mini Till will lay a sale out as a receipt and send it to whatever printer your phone or tablet can reach. There is no till-roll printer wired to a cash drawer, and no emailed or texted receipt.
- No card processing, and no refund button. Both live with your payments provider. Refunds are handled on the reader and noted by hand.
- No weighing. Priced-by-weight goods need scales, and the price has to be entered or the item set up per weight band.
- Data lives on the device. A shared server is more robust than a browser, which is the trade you are making for a till that needs no account and no signal.
If more than one of those matters to you, work through the buyer's guide before you commit to anything, including this.