This is the question worth asking any cloud POS vendor before signing: what happens at 8pm on a Thursday when the connection drops? Many cloud systems simply stop — the screen spins and the queue walks out.
Genuine offline support means orders, the cart and receipts all work locally, and the data reconciles automatically afterwards without anyone re-keying a single sale. Partial implementations that only cache the menu but cannot complete a transaction are not the same thing.
It matters more than it sounds. A single busy evening lost to an outage usually costs more than a year of POS subscription, and the reputational damage of turning customers away is harder to price.
Outale includes offline mode on every plan: a PIN-protected emergency terminal runs full order entry on local storage, prints a simplified receipt, preserves the active cart across reloads, and syncs pending orders automatically on reconnect and every 60 seconds.