Working with no signal: what ONYX1 does offline
Job status changes, job and incident photos, and daily-report co-signatures queue on the phone. Other writes need a signal.
Offline · 2 min read
Plenty of NZ jobs have no coverage. A basement plant room, the middle of a tower, a back block up a gravel road. The work still has to get done, and nothing your crew captures should be lost because the phone dropped to no bars.
What waits on the phone
- Job or incident photos. With no signal, the photo is saved on the phone and the app tells you it will upload once you are back online.
- Co-signatures on submitted daily reports. A dead zone cannot lose the sign-off; it uploads when signal returns.
- Job status changes made by a supervisor or the office. The job moves on screen straight away and the change sends itself later.
Queued work stays saved even if the app is closed or the phone restarts.
What needs signal
Some things are checked live, so they need coverage at the moment you do them:
- Clocking in and out.
- Posting a progress update.
- Submitting a site report needs a connection.
- Adding a photo inside a site report question.
- The customer's sign-off on a job. If they sign with no signal, their name and signature stay on the screen so you can save again once you are back in range.
Open the job before you lose signal. ONYX1 does not keep copies of your pages on the phone, so customer details are never left sitting on a device. The downside is that a page you have not opened yet will not load until you have coverage. You will see a "You're offline" screen with a Try again button instead.
How it catches up
The screen shows Offline and how many things are waiting. When signal comes back, ONYX1 sends everything on its own: as soon as the phone reconnects, when you come back to the app, and every 30 seconds while it is open. Each item is sent once, so a patchy connection does not create doubles. Every change is checked against the same rules as one made with full signal, so the queue cannot skip a step your business has switched on, such as customer sign-off before a job is ready to invoice.
Shared phones and tablets
Queued work belongs to the person who did it and only sends under their name. Signing out tries to send it first, and warns you if some has not gone. On a shared tablet, wait for the Offline label to clear before you hand it over.
Set it up
Step by step, in the ONYX1 help centre.
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