When the internet drops, most small businesses lose four things at once: card payments, the point-of-sale system, the phones and any cloud software the team relies on. The fix is not technical. It is deciding in advance how you will keep taking money and answering customers for the two to six hours an outage usually lasts.
Why outages hit harder than owners expect
A single NBN or mobile fault takes out the connection, and everything sitting on top of it goes with it. Queensland adds its own causes: storm damage to lines, a cut fibre during roadworks, an exchange losing power after a system passes, and network congestion around large events. Businesses that trade on volume, such as cafes, bakeries, bottle shops and takeaway, feel it within minutes.
The five decisions to make before it happens
- Payments: do you switch to a 4G backup terminal, tether the terminal to a phone hotspot, or take cash only?
- Cash: is there a float in the safe, and does the person on shift know the combination?
- Pricing: can staff price and total a sale without the POS, and is there a printed price list?
- Records: how do you capture sales on paper so they can be entered later without guesswork?
- Customers: who posts to your social channels and puts a sign on the door?
"Most outages are survivable. What costs money is the twenty minutes spent working out who decides what to do."
A mobile hotspot is the cheapest insurance in the building
A prepaid mobile hotspot with a different carrier to your main connection costs less than a hundred dollars plus a small monthly fee. Set it up, test that the EFTPOS terminal and the POS can connect to it, and keep it charged in a known drawer. Test it once a quarter, because an untested hotspot with a lapsed SIM is not a backup.
Worked example: a Sunshine Coast bakery
A bakery doing roughly $4,500 on a Saturday lost its connection at 7.20am after a storm took out a nearby exchange. The staff had a written card taped inside the register drawer: switch the terminal to the backup SIM, open the cash float, write sales on the duplicate pad, and post a two-line update to Instagram. They kept trading and lost an estimated $300 in walk-aways. A neighbouring shop closed for the morning and lost the day.
Common mistakes
- Assuming staff will improvise. Under pressure, people wait to be told.
- Having a backup device that nobody has ever connected the terminal to.
- No cash float, in a business that says it can fall back to cash.
- Leaving the phones on a VoIP system with no diverted mobile number.
- No record of what was sold, which turns into a stocktake problem and a tax problem later.
How long do internet outages usually last?
Most faults are resolved within a few hours, though storm and flood damage in regional Queensland can run to several days where crews cannot safely reach the infrastructure. Plan for a day, not an hour, and anything shorter is a bonus.
Should I keep taking cash-only sales during an outage?
It depends on your average transaction value and your customer base. Cash-only works for a cafe and fails for a business selling $900 items. If your average sale is high, a backup connection for the terminal matters far more than a cash float.
Related reading: a power outage plan for cafes and restaurants, the one-page continuity plan, and how to build a risk register.
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