OrderDen on your phone

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

Putting it on your home screen

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

iPhone and iPad: tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. Safari always offers it; on iOS 16.4 or later, other browsers do too.

Computer: Chrome and Edge show an install icon in the address bar, and the dashboard card appears there too. Useful if you like OrderDen in its own window.

On Android and on a computer, the installed app has a shortcut: right-click or long-press its icon for Add an expense.

Lists and lines on a small screen

Lists such as quotes, orders and invoices show each record as a card with its first few columns, and you tap a card to open it. The filter boxes sit behind a Filters button, and you can still tick cards to act on several at once. The lines on a quote, order or invoice are cards too, each with Move line up and Move line down. Turn the phone sideways, or use a wider screen, for the full table.

What works offline

Not much, on purpose. OrderDen keeps your business on the server, not on the phone: two people counting the same stocktake have to see each other's counts, and invoices cached in a browser can be read on a lost phone. So there's no offline copy.

What you get instead:

• A page that says so. Lose signal and you land on OrderDen's own offline page, naming your workspace, instead of the browser's error.
• Pages already open stay open. If you're about to lose signal, load what you need first.
• Nothing you've saved is lost. It's on the server.

The camera

On a phone, the camera is a tap away wherever you'd use it:

• Attachments, item photos and extra receipts have Take photo and Choose file. Take photo opens the back camera, not the gallery.
• A new expense and Photograph it and be done have one button that offers the camera or a file.
• Barcodes: the search bar, stocktake counting, receiving a purchase, shipping an order and the item form can read a barcode with the camera. See barcodes and labels.

Your logo, CSV imports and archive restores use an ordinary file picker.

Photos are shrunk to 2,000 pixels on the long edge before they leave the phone. A 4 MB photo is more than anything here shows, and on a weak connection the smaller file is the one that gets through. PDFs and anything that isn't a photo are sent as they are.

Notifications on your phone

Personal Settings → Notifications has a Push column beside In app and Email. Tick what's worth interrupting you for, such as a quote accepted or a payment in, then press Enable on this device.

Enable it on each device, because notification permission belongs to the browser, not 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's Apple's rule: Safari won't offer notifications to a website that isn't installed.

Push is off for everything until you tick it, and turning it off on a device forgets that device.

Good to know

• It updates itself. The next time you open it, you have the current version.
• Signing out signs you out of that browser, the installed app included: they share one session.
• It's the same app. Every page, report and setting is there on the phone.