POS questions
Can a South African POS keep selling when e-Invoicing connectivity is down?
An offline POS design checklist for South Africa's proposed e-Invoicing model, without inventing future SARS grace periods.
Direct answer
A POS can be designed to retain sales locally and reconcile them after a network outage, but the SARS VAT Modernisation proposal has not yet set a universal offline permission or reporting deadline. Retailers should separate operational continuity from legal compliance: preserve each transaction, make delayed delivery visible, and wait for final rules before promising that any offline workflow is compliant.
Source: VAT Modernisation FAQ (South African Revenue Service).
What matters in practice
- An offline-capable till is not the same as an approved offline tax process.
- Use stable transaction IDs to prevent duplicate sends after reconnection.
- Let store and finance teams see what is queued, sent, rejected or corrected.
The failure to plan for
A store may complete a sale while its WAN connection is unavailable. If the POS later retries without a stable identifier, the same sale can appear twice downstream. If staff can edit the queued record silently, finance may not be able to reconcile the VAT figures.
Build a recoverable queue
Record the original sale, time, store, till, tax amounts and correction links. Queue transmission separately from payment completion. On reconnection, send in a controlled order and retain the provider's response. Flag unresolved exceptions instead of treating a retry as success.
- Test a mid-sale outage and a failed acknowledgement.
- Reconcile queue totals against daily store close.
- Define who can retry, void or correct a transaction.
What SARS still needs to define
The final model may specify timing, exception handling and the treatment of low-connectivity branches. Until those details are published, document your outage design as a technical readiness measure, not as a statement of SARS approval.
Offline test cases
- Disconnect a till after payment but before acknowledgement.
- Restart the branch server with pending transactions.
- Replay the queue and verify no duplicate VAT records appear.
Questions teams ask
Has SARS approved a specific offline POS grace period?
No universal period should be assumed from the current proposal. Verify any later rule against SARS's final legislation and implementation notices.
Should a cashier see a delivery failure?
The POS should distinguish sale completion from tax-message delivery. The exact customer-facing behaviour depends on final rules and the retailer's operating model.
Sources: VAT Modernisation FAQ. Used for factual background only.