Ask where your shop's data lives and most modern software gives the same answer: on our servers, reachable while your internet works and your subscription is paid. That answer has become normal. For a shop's books we think it is the wrong answer, and Layerdots ERP is built the other way round.
Everything you create in the app, sales and bills, inventory, purchases, customers, payments and reports, is stored on your own computer, in a folder inside Documents. You can see the folder. You can copy it. It is yours in the plainest sense, because it is on your machine.
The connection drops and the counter keeps billing
A shop counter cannot wait for a connection to come back. Billing, inventory, reports and backups in Layerdots all work with no internet at all. This is not a degraded offline mode; it is the normal way the app runs. The internet is needed for three optional things: reading a photographed supplier invoice into a purchase entry, Cloud Sync, and app updates.
It is also why there is no online account. You download the app, it runs, you bill. Nothing to register, nothing to sign into, no password to reset at nine in the morning with a queue at the counter. Even the licence check is built to fail open: if our server cannot be reached, the app treats the licence as fine and keeps working, because a shop on bad internet should never be locked out of its own counter.
A folder you can see, copy and carry
- The data is one standard SQLite database file, by default in a Layerdots ERP folder inside Documents, and Settings lets you move it to another drive or folder.
- Backups go where you choose: a pen drive, an external disk, another folder. The app writes a proper snapshot rather than a raw file copy, and it can do so on a schedule. A backup routine sized for a counter is its own article.
- Moving computers is a backup and a restore, including from a Windows PC to a Mac. The file format is the same on both.
- A lapsed subscription does not take the books hostage. When a licence runs out the app stops taking new bills until it is renewed, but reading your data and exporting it stay open, and the file is still in your Documents folder either way.
- A delete-protection password, if you set one, is asked for before a bill, purchase, product, customer or expense is deleted, and a deleted bill, purchase or expense sits in a recycle bin for 30 days.
Cloud Sync is off until you switch it on
There is a Cloud Sync feature, and it is useful. It keeps the same shop available on a second computer, and it lets the phone app raise real invoices when the shop computer is off. But it is off by default. Until you switch it on, nothing leaves your machine.
If you do enable it, your shop's records are copied to a private account only you can reach, on our cloud provider's servers in India (Mumbai region), isolated to your own licence. Delete something in the app and the cloud copy is purged too; a computer that has been disconnected for more than 30 days is not rejoined automatically, precisely so that a stale copy cannot bring deleted rows back. Switch sync off and new changes stop being uploaded. The choice stays yours, in both directions, at any time.
What local-first asks of you
The trade is plain. Because the books live on your machine, keeping a copy somewhere else is your job, and the app can do most of it: turn the automatic backup on and point it at a drive that leaves the shop, or turn cloud backup on and let it keep an encrypted copy off-site every day. Because the computer numbers its own bills, two computers or a phone billing at the same time need the internet to share one number series; a single-PC shop never does. And because there is no account, the licence key is the one thing to keep safe, since it is also what opens a cloud backup on a new PC.
Layerdots is made for shop counters where the connection drops, the power cuts, and the queue does not care. Software that depends on someone else's server for every bill is fragile in exactly the place a shop cannot afford fragility. Local-first is fast because the data is right there, private because it never left, and dependable because the only machine that has to be up is the one on your counter.