It will happen, probably on a busy evening. The difference between an inconvenience and a disaster is entirely in whether there was a plan.
Have a second connection ready
A phone hotspot is the answer for almost every shop in Pakistan. It costs very little, it is already in somebody's pocket, and switching to it takes seconds.
The mistake is not having no backup. It is having a backup nobody has ever tested, so the first attempt happens under pressure.
- Test the hotspot once a month, not once ever
- Save the password where the counter can find it
- Know which staff member knows how
Keep serving
If both connections are genuinely down, take the sale on paper and enter it when you are back. It is not ideal, but a customer who leaves without their goods is worse than five minutes of catching up.
Write the item, the quantity, the rate and whether it was cash or credit. That is enough to enter it properly later.
Your data is not on the counter
Worth remembering in the moment: nothing is lost. The sales history, the customer balances and the stock are on the server, not on the machine in front of you.
A connection failure delays billing. It does not destroy anything, which is the opposite of what happens when a shop's only copy is on a computer that dies.
Enter the paper sales the same day
Not tomorrow. Stock and khata are wrong until it is done, and a slip left overnight is a slip that gets lost.
Ten minutes at closing keeps the records honest.
Every system has a failure mode. The professional response is not to pretend otherwise, it is to decide in advance what happens.
