If you keep the books for fifty businesses, you do not want fifty sets of books on your phone. It is a lot of space, and it is a lot of other people’s money sitting in your pocket. So Finocket lets you choose: a client is either kept on this device, ready to work on with no signal, or not.
Settings → Offline sync → Offline copies is where you choose. The line at the top is the whole story in one sentence — something like 3 of 50 clients available offline · 210 MB — and the clients you keep are listed first, so you are not scrolling past forty-seven you do not.
Turning a client on
Switch a client on and Finocket keeps their books on this device: their ledgers, their invoices, their outstanding. You can then open them with no network at all — on a site visit, in a basement, on a train. Switch them off and that copy is removed from the device. Nothing happens to their books on the server, and nothing happens to your access; you are choosing what this one device carries, not what exists.
An owner or their assistant does not need any of this. One or two businesses, kept in full, always — that is the default and there is nothing to decide. The choosing exists for a portfolio.
How much space, and why there is no bar
Each client shows what their books took on this device at their last sync. What you will not see is a “4 GB of 10 GB used” bar, and that is deliberate. The figure a browser reports as your total space is not a measurement: on Chrome it is simply whatever you are using plus ten gigabytes, which means it grows as you store more and never shrinks when the device fills up. A bar drawn against that number would look reassuring right up to the moment the device ran out. So Finocket shows you the part it actually measured, per client, and draws no ceiling around it.
Below that, the space is split by whose books it is. That distinction is not cosmetic: a firm you act for is one client even when it holds three GST registrations, because three registrations under one PAN are one company. So the figure beside a client’s name is their whole workspace, not one of its registrations — and your own books are listed separately, so taking on another client never makes your own firm look larger.
Nothing is apportioned or estimated to work this out. Each client’s books live in their own store on the device, so the number beside their name was measured by reading their store and nobody else’s. If you act for nobody, this section does not appear at all — there is nothing to tell apart.
Removing a client, and what “removed” means
Remove is not a delete button, and the difference matters on a device that has been offline. Anything you recorded for that client and has not yet reached the server is sent first. Only when the last of it has landed is the local copy removed. If you are offline, or something is still queued, Finocket tells you so and removes nothing — it will finish on its own next time the device is online.
Occasionally an entry can never be sent: the server refused it, and no number of retries changes that. Finocket will not quietly throw those away to complete a removal. It leaves the client on the device, tells you exactly how many entries are stuck, and asks you to say so explicitly before anything is abandoned.
An empty list is not one thing
If no clients are listed, Finocket tells you which of these is true rather than showing you a reassuring zero:
- Offline copies are not switched on in this app yet. This is what everyone sees today. It is being rolled out, and no version you can install has it turned on for anybody. Nothing is wrong with your workspace.
- Your workspace is not set up for it. We asked, and the answer was no — it is switched on a few workspaces at a time. Ask us and we can add yours.
- We could not check. Usually there is no connection. This is not a no; it is no answer at all, and Finocket says so in those words rather than guessing on your behalf.
- The list itself could not be read. Your copies are untouched — Finocket simply could not read which ones they are, and will not show you a zero it cannot stand behind.
- Everything is on and you have not chosen any yet. The only one of the five that is good news, and the only one where the answer is to turn a client on.
What this is not
Keeping a client offline does not change who may read their books. That is decided by the access you have been granted, on the server, and this screen cannot widen it. It also does not change what you owe them: a copy on your device is still their data, which is exactly why keeping three clients rather than fifty is the safer habit.
Entries you make without signal already queue and send today, with or without any of this. That queue, and anything stuck in it, is on Offline & sync. If two of your devices changed the same figure, that is a different thing again — see Sync conflicts.