OrderDen on your phone

OrderDen is a website that behaves like an app on a phone. There is nothing to download from a store: add it to your home screen and it opens without an address bar, with its own icon, in its own place in the task switcher.

That matters most where you are least likely to be sitting at a desk — in the workshop, or in a queue at the wholesaler with a receipt in your hand.

Putting it on your home screen

Android (Chrome, Edge, Samsung Internet) — a card appears on your dashboard the first time: tap Install. If you dismissed it, the browser's ⋮ menu has Install app or Add to Home screen.

iPhone and iPad (Safari) — Apple has never offered a one-tap install, so it is two: tap the Share button in Safari's toolbar, then Add to Home Screen. It has to be Safari; Chrome on an iPhone cannot do it.

Desktop — Chrome and Edge show an install icon in the address bar. Useful if you like OrderDen in its own window rather than one tab among thirty.

One shortcut comes with it: Add an expense. Long-press the icon to get at it.

What works offline, and what does not

Honestly: not much, and that is deliberate.

OrderDen keeps your business on the server, not on the phone. Two people counting the same stocktake on two phones have to see each other's counts, and a copy of your invoices sitting in a browser cache is a copy somebody else can find on a lost handset. So there is no offline database.

What you get instead:

• A page that says so. Lose signal and you land on OrderDen's own offline page, naming your workspace, rather than the browser's error.
• Pages already on screen stay on screen. Nothing is thrown away because the connection dropped. If you are about to lose signal, load what you need first.
• Nothing you have already saved is lost. A saved sale is on the server.

The camera comes first

Anywhere OrderDen takes a file, there are two buttons: Take photo and Choose file. On a phone the first one opens the back camera directly — which is the one pointing at the receipt — rather than the gallery.

Photographs are shrunk to 2,000 pixels before they leave the device. A phone camera makes a 4 MB picture that nothing here will ever show at full size, and on a weak data connection those megabytes are the difference between "filed" and "gave up". Receipts, product photos and attachments all go through it; PDFs and anything that is not a photograph are sent exactly as they are.

Notifications on your phone

Personal Settings → Notifications has a Push column beside In app and Email. Tick what is worth interrupting you for — a quote accepted, a payment in — and then Enable on this device.

It has to be enabled once per device, because a browser's notification permission belongs to that browser and not to your account. Turning it on on a laptop does nothing for your phone.

On an iPhone, push works only once OrderDen is on your home screen. That is Apple's rule, not ours: Safari will not offer notifications to a website that has not been installed.

Nothing is pushed unless you ask for it. Push is off for every kind until you tick it, and turning it off on a device forgets that device entirely.

Things worth knowing

• It updates itself. There is no version to install; the next time you open it you have the current one.
• Signing out signs you out everywhere in that browser. The installed app and the browser share one session.
• It is the same app. Every page, every report, every setting — the phone is not a cut-down version.