Phone: saves and syncs. Tablet: remembers its site.
Remote sites don’t have perfect signal. Basements, concrete yards, farms in Alentejo — the phone shows one bar, or none. If clock-in only works online, you lose the very punch you need to prove work happened.
We wanted to be honest about what still works offline today — on a phone and on the shared tablet — not what we hope will work next year.
The fictional site with no signal
We created Quinta da Pedra — Cave, a fake basement site in Lisbon with concrete walls and no reliable mobile data. Two fictional crews:
- Crew A — phones only: 6 workers with personal smartphones
- Crew B — gate kiosk: 8 workers scanning QR badges at a wall tablet
Both crews worked the same morning: clock-in at 07:00, break 12:00–12:30, clock-out at 15:00. We cut the internet at 06:55 and restored it at 15:30.
The real shape of offline work
Offline isn’t just “no internet for an hour.” It’s:
- A phone with airplane mode on, clocking in at 07:00
- A tablet that was paired yesterday and restarted this morning
- A punch that must not duplicate when the network comes back
- A manager who still needs to see who was there, even before sync
The test wasn’t “does it save?” It was “does it save without creating a duplicate, losing the GPS check, or confusing the site?”
What had to get right
- Does a phone punch with no signal get saved on the device and sent later — with the same time, location and device check?
- Does the tablet still remember which site it belongs to after a restart?
- When the network returns, does each punch send once — not twice?
- Does a punch flagged as “offline” still show up for the manager before sync?
These are normal construction and hospitality days, not edge cases.
What we proved
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Phone clock-in works offline today. The punch is saved on the phone and sent automatically when the signal returns. Time, location and device check travel with it — no data lost, no duplicate.
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Tablet remembers its site. The tablet is paired once via the site QR. Even after a restart, it still knows it is “Quinta da Pedra — Cave.” That pairing is what keeps a scan from being logged to the wrong site.
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Tablet punch still needs a retry today. When a worker scans at the tablet with no internet, the tablet tries to send the punch right away and shows an error if it can’t. It will retry — a full “save and send later” queue for the tablet is on the roadmap, as our kiosk docs already state. What this means for you: for basements or remote yards, keep a manager’s phone as a backup clock-in until the tablet queue ships. Most teams never notice, because the phone already covers it.
All 3 scenarios passed, and none broke existing attendance records.
What “offline” really means in practice
For a staffing agency or a site manager, offline isn’t a feature you demo — it’s a day when:
- Workers are in a basement, a tunnel, or a field with one bar
- The tablet was mounted last week and hasn’t been touched since
- Payroll still needs the exact 07:00–15:00 hours, with breaks excluded
- The client still needs proof the crew was there
If a system only works online, you end up back on paper for the very days you need proof most.
Where Chegatta is today
- Phone offline: ready today — save, then sync, no duplicates.
- Tablet offline: pairing is persistent; punch retry is live. Full queued offline for tablets is the next layer we’re explicit about.
- No background location tracking in either case — location is checked only at the moment of the tap.
If you run sites with weak signal, the right question to ask any vendor is: “show me the same crew, same day, with the internet off — then turn it on.” This is ours.