Access Expense Registration Offline with Draft Persistence
Peer mentors often register expenses directly after home visits or community activities, which may occur in areas with limited mobile coverage. The app must allow the expense form to be completed offline, save the draft locally using the local distance cache and storage adapters, and automatically attempt submission when connectivity is detected. The draft should be clearly marked as 'Pending Upload' in the expense list. Receipt images should also be queued for upload. The auto-approval evaluation must run server-side once connectivity is restored, not client-side, to ensure threshold configurations are current.
User Story
Audience Summaries
Peer mentors operate in homes, care facilities, and rural areas where mobile connectivity is unreliable — and this is precisely where expense underreporting originates. By enabling fully offline expense registration with automatic background submission, this story directly attacks the root cause of incomplete activity data that undermines Bufdir reporting accuracy. Organizations retain volunteers longer when reimbursement is frictionless and immediate, reducing the administrative friction that discourages participation. This capability also strengthens the platform's competitive position as a purpose-built tool for community-based volunteer coordination, differentiating it from generic expense apps that require connectivity.
The automatic connectivity detection and server-side auto-approval logic ensures threshold configurations remain under organizational control, reducing compliance risk while maintaining the user experience quality that drives volunteer satisfaction and retention across all three partner organizations.
This story has medium priority but high delivery complexity due to the combination of offline storage, background sync, and image queuing requirements. Development effort spans multiple layers: mobile storage adapters for draft persistence, a connectivity detection service, a background sync queue, and server-side submission triggers. Cross-functional coordination is required between mobile developers, backend engineers, and QA for connectivity simulation testing. Key delivery risks include edge cases around partial submissions, failed image uploads, and duplicate submission prevention after network reconnection.
Acceptance criteria demand thorough testing across offline, partially connected, and reconnected states. The dependency on story-travel-expense-registration-peer-mentor-001 must be resolved before this story can be delivered. Rollout planning should include user communication about the 'Pending Upload' indicator to set expectations and prevent confusion.
Implementation requires a local draft persistence layer using the existing local distance cache and storage adapters — the draft schema must mirror the server-side expense payload to enable seamless submission on reconnect. Offline form functionality requires all UI components to operate without API calls, meaning rate lookups and validation must be pre-cached. A background connectivity monitor (e.g., NetInfo or equivalent) triggers draft submission automatically; the submission queue must be idempotent to prevent duplicate records. Receipt images require separate binary queuing with retry logic independent of form data.
Auto-approval evaluation must explicitly be skipped client-side and deferred to server-side processing post-submission — this is a hard constraint to prevent stale threshold usage. Edge cases: failed background submissions must preserve draft integrity; concurrent drafts must not collide; app restart mid-queue must resume gracefully. Integration tests should simulate airplane mode toggling and partial upload failures.
Acceptance Criteria
- Given I am offline, when I open the expense registration screen, then the form is fully functional and I can enter all expense details
- Given I complete an expense form while offline, when I tap 'Submit', then the claim is saved as a local draft and marked 'Pending Upload' in my expense list
- Given a draft exists and connectivity is restored, when the app detects network access, then the draft is automatically submitted to the server without requiring manual action
- Given a receipt image was attached offline, when the draft is submitted, then the image is uploaded as part of the same submission without loss
- Given I reopen the app offline with a saved draft, when I view the expense list, then the draft is visible with a clear 'Pending Upload' indicator
- Given a background submission attempt fails after connectivity is restored, when the error occurs, then a notification informs me to retry and the draft is preserved
Business Value
Many peer mentor activities occur in homes, care facilities, and rural areas where mobile coverage is unreliable. Offline capability ensures that registrations happen at the point of activity rather than being postponed and forgotten, directly addressing the underreporting problem identified as the primary challenge in all three organizations' workshops.
Components
- Expense Registration Screen ui
- Expense Form BLoC service
- Expense Submission Service service
- Local Distance Cache infrastructure
- Receipt Storage Adapter data
- Expense Repository data
- Local Storage Adapter infrastructure
- Auto-Approval Threshold Evaluator service
- Expense Threshold Configuration infrastructure