When the network goes
The internet drops. The counter keeps moving.
Most business software is a website: when the connection goes, the screen goes with it and your team reaches for a paper pad. Wash Junkie is built the other way round — it reads from a copy held on the device, and every change waits its turn.
What still works with no connection
Everything your team does at the counter and on the floor. Take a new order and hand over a reference. Move an order to its next status. Add or remove an item. Record what a customer paid. Look up a customer, a driver, a machine. Load a machine and record the run.
The screens do not grey out and nothing asks you to wait. As far as the person at the counter is concerned there was no outage — which is the point, because the customer in front of them does not care whose network failed.
What happens to those changes
Each one is written to the copy on the device straight away, so the screen is correct immediately, and queued in a durable list of things to send. When the connection returns, that queue is replayed against Wash Junkie in order, on its own, without anybody pressing anything.
The queue survives a reload, a closed tab and a flat battery. It is not held in memory and it is not lost by navigating away.
Why a replay does not double anything
This is the part that decides whether offline support is a feature or a liability. A queue that replays blindly is how one order becomes two and one payment becomes two.
Every queued change carries a key that identifies it, and the server treats a repeat of the same key as the same change rather than a new one — so a change that was actually delivered before the connection dropped does not land twice. Changes that alter a specific field carry a precondition describing the value they expected to find, so a replay that arrives after somebody else edited the same field is refused rather than silently overwriting their work.
When two people changed the same thing
If a queued change cannot be applied because the record moved underneath it, Wash Junkie does not pick a winner quietly. It stops, shows what you changed against what is now on the server, and asks which should stand — field by field, not whole-record-at-once.
Some of those it resolves without asking, where there is only one sensible answer. The rest it puts in front of a person, because a wrong price that nobody was told about is worse than a question.
What this is not.Wash Junkie still needs a connection at some point — this is an outage you ride out, not a system that runs indefinitely without a network. Signing in for the first time on a device needs a connection, and so does anything that has to be true across outlets at the moment you ask, such as reading a report on another outlet’s day.
Why this matters more here than elsewhere
A laundry runs at a counter with a queue in front of it, often in a place where the power and the network are the same problem. The cost of the screen going down is not lost data — it is the person at the front of the queue watching somebody write on a bag with a marker, and the half hour of typing that follows once the connection is back.
Read next
- Working with no network — the manual, for when it is actually happening.
- What Wash Junkie does not do — the limits, including this one.