Offline Mode: Work Without Wi-Fi

Why Offline Mode?

Tradesmen don't always have signal. Basements, lofts, rural areas, thick-walled buildings — you know the drill. A.X.E.L works even when your phone doesn't have internet, so you're never locked out of your business data on-site.

How It Works

A.X.E.L uses a service worker — a small piece of code that runs in the background and caches your data as you use the app. There's nothing to set up. It just works.

Automatic Caching

Every time you open A.X.E.L, it automatically caches:

• Today's appointments — so you always know where you're going
• Recent leads (last 50 new + contacted) — the ones you're most likely to reference
• Active jobs — all in-progress and scheduled jobs
• Materials list — check stock and prices on-site
• Customers, tasks, and team — your key contacts and to-dos
• Dashboard stats — your numbers at a glance
• All dashboard pages — navigate freely offline

This happens silently in the background. The cache refreshes every 30 minutes when you're online, and again whenever you open the app after it's been in the background.

Offline Banner

When you lose connection, a yellow banner appears at the top of the screen:

"You're offline — showing cached data (2h ago)"

The time tells you how fresh the data is. You can dismiss the banner if you don't need the reminder — it'll reappear next time you go offline.

What You Can Do Offline

✅ Read Everything You've Visited

Any page you've opened while online is available offline. This includes lead details, job pages, quotes, invoices, expenses, calendar — the lot.

✅ Add New Leads

Fill in the lead form as normal. It gets saved to an offline queue and syncs automatically when you're back online. You'll see a yellow "pending" indicator at the bottom of the screen.

✅ Log Expenses

Add expenses on-site — description, amount, category. The expense is queued and syncs later. Note: receipt photo upload requires a connection, so the photo will need to be added after you're back online.

✅ Add Notes to Leads

Jot down notes while you're on-site. They queue up and sync when connectivity returns.

✅ Update Job Status

Mark a job as complete, move it to the next stage — the update shows immediately on your screen (optimistic UI) and syncs in the background.

The Offline Queue

When you make changes offline, they're stored in an offline queue on your device. You'll see a floating yellow pill at the bottom of the screen showing how many actions are pending:

"3 pending"

Tap it to see the full queue with details:

• What each action is (e.g. "Add lead: John Smith")
• When it was queued
• Whether it's syncing or failed

You can also:

• Sync Now — manually trigger sync when you get signal
• Remove individual items you don't want to sync
• Clear All — discard the entire queue

Automatic Sync

You don't have to do anything. When your phone reconnects to the internet, the queue replays automatically — even if you've closed the app. A.X.E.L uses the browser's Background Sync API to handle this behind the scenes.

Failed Syncs

If an action fails (e.g. the server rejects it), it'll retry up to 3 times. After that, it shows as "Failed" in the queue so you can review it and decide what to do.

Pages You Haven't Visited

If you try to open a page you haven't visited while online, you'll see a friendly message:

"This page hasn't been cached yet. Visit it once while online and it'll be available offline next time."

Tip: before heading to a job site, quickly open the lead detail page and job page for that job. They'll be cached and ready for offline viewing.

Tips for Best Offline Experience

1. Open the app each morning — this triggers a full cache refresh of your most important data
2. Browse key pages before going on-site — lead details, job pages, and materials are the most useful offline
3. Install the app — the PWA version (see Install as App) works better offline than a browser tab
4. Don't panic about the queue — everything syncs automatically when you're back online, no data is lost

What Requires Internet

Some features need a live connection:

• Sending quotes or invoices by email
• Uploading photos and receipt images
• Voice-to-lead and voice-to-quote (needs OpenAI)
• Stripe payments
• Push notifications (receiving them)
• Xero/QuickBooks sync

Everything else works offline with cached data.

Technical Details

For the curious: A.X.E.L uses a service worker with network-first caching for API data and cache-first for static assets. Offline mutations are stored in IndexedDB and replayed via the Background Sync API. Cache versioning ensures clean updates when we ship new features. No plugins, no extra downloads — it's all built into the web app.