Retail POS Incident Response Checklist
Contain a billing interruption without losing evidence, creating duplicate transactions, or hiding what remains unresolved.
Record and classify the incident
- Record the start time, business date, location, affected tills, POS version, operator, symptoms, and response coordinator.
- Classify the failed component: device, local POS service, database, LAN, internet, hosted server, payment terminal, printer, synchronization, or user access.
- Preserve exact errors, transaction IDs, screenshots, logs, and recent changes before restarting or modifying anything.
- Separate confirmed facts from assumptions and timestamp every material decision.
Choose a controlled fallback
| Decision | Control | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Stop retries | Pause repeated actions that could duplicate sales, refunds, payments, stock movements, or kitchen tickets. | Last known transaction and affected identifiers. |
| Continue safely | Use only a documented alternate till, Offline POS mode, local server, manual receipt, or tender restriction. | Fallback start time, operator, and unique temporary references. |
| Protect payments | Do not collect card details outside an approved payment flow or weaken access controls to restore service. | Allowed tenders and staff instruction. |
| Communicate | Tell staff what remains available, what is prohibited, and when the next update will occur. | Message, audience, owner, and timestamp. |
Recover and reconcile
Restore one dependency at a time where practical. Confirm application health before reopening billing, then run a controlled test sale and, where applicable, a void or return. For Online/Offline POS recovery, verify queue depth, synchronization direction, conflict handling, and duplicate prevention before assuming every till is current.
Reconcile the full incident window. Do not delete, rewrite, or invent transactions merely to make POS, cash, stock, and processor totals agree.
Compare POS sales, payment-terminal batches, cash, inventory movements, refunds, voids, discounts, manual receipts, and queued records. Preserve each unresolved item with an owner and due time.
Close and learn
- Record the end time, restored services, validation, residual risk, affected records, customer follow-up, and approver.
- Retain the original evidence, timeline, reconciliation, and corrective actions under applicable legal and accounting requirements.
- Review root cause, monitoring gaps, backup or restore failures, staff guidance, and prevention work.
- Do not call a workaround permanent until the relevant failure can no longer be reproduced.
Posnic is offline-first open source POS and Billing Software for retail shops and restaurants. The public Posnic/POS source repository documents local and Online/Offline POS workflows. Validate the exact deployment, payment boundary, backup, synchronization, and recovery behavior used by your store.