Question 1

Will my field service software keep working during load shedding or without signal?

Accepted Answer

Omni Field's field app will, for the work the technician has already opened. It is an installable web app on Android and iPhone that holds job cards on the phone: with no power at the site and no signal from the tower, the technician can still tick tasks, add photos and notes, record parts and time on site, and collect the customer's signature, and all of it sits in a sync queue until coverage returns, then sends on its own. What it will not do without a connection is fetch new jobs, send the customer a WhatsApp or email, or take a card payment; those wait. That is what offline tolerant means, and it is a deliberately narrower claim than fully offline. For most trades the practical answer is yes: open the day while connected, work through the outage, and let the app catch up between sites.

Question 2

Is Omni Field a fully offline app?

Accepted Answer

No, and the distinction is worth having straight before you rely on it. A fully offline app keeps a complete local database on the phone, so a technician can start a job they have never seen, look up any customer and generate documents with no connection at all, at the cost of a heavier app and a more complex sync. Omni Field is offline tolerant: jobs that have been opened, and everything captured on them, live on the phone and sync when coverage returns, while anything that needs fresh data from the server waits for a connection. The reason for stating it this way is the house rule that marketing describes what ships. A technician who opens their day in the morning and works through a load shedding block will not notice the difference; a technician who expects to pull a brand new job out of the air in a basement will.

Question 3

What happens to photos and signatures captured with no signal?

Accepted Answer

They are stored on the phone as part of the job card and sent with it when the connection returns. A photo taken in a plant room with no signal is attached to the card immediately from the technician's point of view, appears in the card on the phone, and is uploaded by the sync queue afterwards; the same is true of the customer's signature drawn on the screen and of notes, task ticks, parts and time entries. The queue survives the app being closed and the phone being restarted, and it retries until the upload succeeds, so a long outage does not lose the evidence. Once uploaded, the photos and the signature are stored with the job on the server, appear in the office view and on the job report, and print on the invoice where you choose to include them. Nothing is emailed or sent to the customer until the card has actually synced.

Question 4

Does GPS tracking still work when the signal drops?

Accepted Answer

Position records are captured on the phone and sent when there is signal, so a trail is not lost during a gap, but live tracking, by definition, shows the office the last position it received until the phone reconnects. Clock-in and clock-out are recorded on the device at the moment the technician taps them and are checked against the site geofence when the record syncs, so an outage does not stop a technician from clocking in on site or make the clock-in look late. Live tracking, geofence arrival and departure alerts and the idle and offline alerts are part of the Growth plan and available on PaYu as an add-on; they run only while the technician is clocked in and has given consent in the app. An offline alert during load shedding is exactly that, the phone being unreachable, and the office learns to read it as such.

Question 5

How should a team plan a day around load shedding?

Accepted Answer

Open the day while connected, before leaving the yard or over coffee: that pulls the day's jobs, customer details and site history onto each phone. Work through the outage as normal, completing each card on site; the queue holds it. Let the app catch up between sites, which it does in the background as soon as it sees a signal, and check the office view mid-morning to confirm the early cards have arrived. Send customer messages and payment links from the card once it has synced rather than assuming they went. For sites known to have no coverage at all, take the photos and the signature on the phone, and raise the invoice from the office afterwards. The published load shedding schedule is worth pinning next to the day plan: a technician who knows the outage window for a suburb can open the next job before it starts.

Field service software that keeps working through load shedding

What load shedding does to field work

What the Omni Field app does with no connection

What it does not do, stated plainly

The office side during an outage

What Omni Field does here

Common questions

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