Inventory system crashed during our busiest weekend, lost 4 hours of sales data

I manage operations at a small retail shop in Austin and last Saturday our inventory system went down right at noon. We had like 60 people in line and couldn't process any sales for 20 minutes while I rebooted everything. When it came back up, over 4 hours of transaction records were just gone, so we had to manually reconcile with credit card statements. My boss asked me why we don't have a backup system in place, but honestly the owner never wanted to spend the money on a cloud solution. Has anyone else dealt with a total system failure during peak hours and have a cheap way to set up a backup? Keep it simple lol.

2 comments

2 Comments

emeryfox13d ago

I read a piece a while back about a boutique using a simple Google Form as a backup register that saved their ass when their POS died mid sale. Just have a tablet or spare phone with the form loaded that logs item name, price, and customer name so you can key it in later. Your boss might roll their eyes at the duct tape approach but it beats losing 4 hours of receipts and having to haggle with credit card company reports.

jesse_cooper13d ago

Keep in mind though @emeryfox, that Google Forms offline mode only works if you set it up before the WiFi goes down. Had a friend learn that the hard way when their internet took a hit and the form wouldn't load. Still a solid backup plan, just test it offline first.