The visit becomes a service order right there in the customer's yard — with or without a signal

Reticar wasn't starting from scratch — and that's what makes this harder, not easier. They already had an app, custom-built years earlier, that the sales team used every day. The problem: it had frozen in time — legacy code with no one maintaining it, and recurring bugs concentrated in exactly the part a field team cannot lose: data synchronization. When sync hangs, the rep isn't stuck with an ugly app; the rep is unable to work.

And Reticar's work happens on the road. The sales team serves machine shops, diesel mechanics, trucking companies and farming co-ops scattered across the countryside of three states — places where cell coverage is a hypothesis, not a fact. The rep arrives, inspects a cracked cylinder head in the yard, needs that account's history, has to log what they saw and open the service order. If any of those four things requires internet, the process breaks and turns into a note to be typed up later — with all the delay and rework that carries.

• Sync that froze the whole app — while it ran it blocked even basic actions, and it ran every single time someone opened the app.
• Legacy code with no maintenance: no new feature could ship without risk, and no one owned what already existed.
• Visits and service orders lived apart — what was seen at the customer didn't become a document in the same motion.
• Reps could see accounts that weren't theirs: the territory structure wasn't reflected in the system.
• No proof of physical presence at the customer — no time, no location.

The founding decision was to treat the rep's app as a system that runs on its own and only then talks to the server — not as a screen querying an API. The app carries a local database on the phone itself and works off it: all 3,819 customers live on the device, search is local, the map is local, registration is local. When the signal returns, the queue uploads. That's the difference between "the app has an offline mode" and "the app is offline by design." It also changed when sync happens: in the old app it fired on every launch and froze everything; here it stopped being a toll gate at the door — each record created offline shows its own sync indicator, and work continues while the queue drains.

The second decision was to get the keyboard out of the way. Logging a visit by typing, standing in a trucking yard, doesn't happen — and what doesn't happen becomes a lost mental note. So the visit description became spoken: the rep records and the phone's own speech recognition transcribes into the text field, with a duration limit. No audio is uploaded anywhere and no external transcription service is involved — it's the device's native capability, which keeps the feature available in the field and the cost at zero.

The third was to make the system see Reticar's actual commercial structure. Territory became a four-level hierarchy — State, Macro-region, Micro-region and City — and reps are linked to regions, not to a list of accounts. Whoever covers the Chapecó macro-region sees Chapecó customers; whoever covers Passo Fundo sees Passo Fundo. Every grant and every revocation of that link is written to the audit log as its own event.