Works without signal, and says what's backed up

Where reselling actually happens

Sourcing rarely happens somewhere with good signal. The best estate sales are in old houses with stone basements. Barn sales are down gravel roads. The thrift store’s back corner, where the housewares are, is behind three walls of donated sofas. Auction houses in small towns are metal buildings that block everything.

If recording needs a connection, it doesn’t happen there. It happens later, from memory, if it happens at all. So Sellers Almanac records without one.

Recording with no bars

With no signal, you record a purchase, an expense or a sale the same way you would anywhere else. The record is on your phone. Until it is backed up, it isn’t folded quietly into your totals. Home shows it on its own line beside them (recorded on this phone, not backed up yet, and not in this total), so the figures never pretend to know more than the server does.

What changes is how the record is labelled.

Two honest labels

Every record made without a connection carries one of two labels:

• On this phone only: the record exists on this phone and nowhere else yet.
• Backed up: the record has reached the server.

The wording is deliberate. Plenty of apps reassure you the moment you tap a button, whether or not anything has left the device. That’s comfortable to read and unhelpful to know. If your phone slides off the truck tailgate before a record is backed up, the record goes with it. You deserve to know which records are in that position.

Whenever the app is open and has a connection, records waiting on the phone are backed up automatically: when you open the app, right after you record, and again every so often while it stays open. As each one is backed up, its label changes. Backing up doesn’t happen while the app is closed. You don’t have to remember which ones you made offline; the label remembers for you.

If two changes clash

Working offline creates one real risk: the same record changed in two places before either change is backed up. Perhaps you corrected a sale’s amount on your phone in the auction barn, and the same sale was changed on another phone signed in to the business.

When that happens, Sellers Almanac doesn’t pick a winner quietly. The clash waits in Needs attention, and nothing is overwritten until you review it and decide which version is right. For money records, silently overwriting one version with another is exactly the kind of error that’s never noticed until it matters.

A few practical habits

• Glance at the labels at the end of a sourcing day. Once you’re home on Wi-Fi, open the app and everything should soon read Backed up.
• Before you replace or reset a phone, check that nothing still says On this phone only.
• Don’t wait for signal to record. The offline record is the real record. Make it at the stop, while you still remember what the box of linens cost.

Records made offline behave like any others. If you left a detail for later, the record waits in Needs attention. If a sale needs fixing, you can correct or void it.

Where it stands

Offline recording is in founder testing on iPhone, in a test build the founders use. It isn’t available to download yet. Partners can share one business from their own phones too, and the roadmap shows the rest.