Health, history and alerts
Everything about a supplier’s health is on one screen: BossMage, StockBoss. A card per supplier says when it last worked, what changed and how it is doing, and an email finds you when that changes.
A healthy supplier is quiet. That is the point. The dangerous failure in stock syncing is not the loud one. It is the supplier that stopped a fortnight ago while every screen said fine.
What a card says
Section titled “What a card says”Reading down a supplier’s card:
- Its name, yours if you gave it one when you connected it.
- What happened on the last run, in a sentence.
- A meta line: how many products it feeds, when it last updated, when it is due next.
- A pill with one word for its state.
A card in trouble leads with how old your figures are, not when it last tried. Those are different numbers, and the second is misleading. “13 minutes ago” under a warning reads as recent. What it really means is that something tried 13 minutes ago, and the figures on your products are nine hours old.
If nothing is scheduled, the card says so, because “it has stopped” and “it has stopped and will not fix itself” call for different reactions.
What each pill means
Section titled “What each pill means”| Pill | What it means |
|---|---|
| Working | The last run applied and nothing is wrong. |
| Not run yet | Connected, never run. Press Check now. |
| Paused | You set the schedule to Off. Nothing runs, nothing changes. |
| Going stale | It ran, but with warnings worth reading. |
| Refused a bad file | StockBoss stopped a file it did not trust, and changed nothing. |
| Not updating | The supplier failed: no reply, or a reply that could not be read. |
| Needs a look | Something about this shop’s setup is stopping it, not the supplier. |
A failure has one word, and a refusal has its own. A supplier that failed says Not updating whether it timed out or answered nonsense. The sentence above the pill says which it was. A refusal is different and says so: StockBoss looked at what came back, did not trust it, and left every figure alone. The classic case is a half-length file from a supplier having a bad morning. Applied naively, that file would read as “everything is out of stock”. The refusal pill is amber rather than red, because the system worked. The sentence beside it says what looked wrong, and that nothing has been changed.
The Needs you screen
Section titled “The Needs you screen”BossMage > Needs you is the list of things waiting for a person. The menu shows a count beside it when the list is not empty. It counts suppliers, not items, so one supplier retiring a season cannot pin the badge at forty and teach you to ignore it.
Three kinds of thing land here:
- Warnings from the last run: a stale file on your server, a column that changed, anything the run applied but wants you to know about.
- A refusal or a failure, with the sentence saying which and why.
- Products the supplier no longer lists. The overnight range re-read compares their catalogue with what you stock. When something you sell has left their range, a row says so. “They no longer list GD067 in colour NVY, which ‘Heavy Blend Hoodie, Navy’ was built from. Nothing in your shop has been removed.” The decision is yours: keep selling what you hold, switch supplier, or retire the product. StockBoss never removes or hides a product over it.
A long list of leavers is capped at five rows per supplier, plus a line saying how many more there are.
History
Section titled “History”BossMage > History keeps the last 20 runs for each supplier: when it ran, what came back, what changed, and a word for how it went. Older runs drop off as new ones arrive.
This is what turns “I think it stopped working sometime last week” into a date.
Runs skipped because the supplier’s own limit had not passed are recorded as skipped, so a quiet history is not mistaken for a broken one.
The emails
Section titled “The emails”Two things can go wrong, so two things are watched, and each has its own memory so one can never silence the other.
The supplier stopped answering properly. You get one email when it starts, and one when it recovers.
Nothing is asking the supplier at all. A schedule that is not booked, or one that is booked and long overdue because WordPress’s timer has stopped on a quiet site. Again, one when it starts and one when it is back.
Emails arrive on the change, never on the state. A message that arrives every night is a message you learn to delete. So a healthy supplier is silent, and silence means healthy. The all-clear is sent too, because knowing it fixed itself matters as much as knowing it broke.
Alerts are on by default and go to your shop’s admin address. Turn them off on the History screen.
A supplier can fail the same way every night, and each individual run looks like one bad night. StockBoss watches across runs: two days without a file anybody believed counts as trouble even when no single run looked alarming. Two days rather than one, so a shop that checks once a day and misses a night is not woken up over it. A supplier that has never applied anything is not in trouble, it is new.
What to do when something is red
Section titled “What to do when something is red”- Read the sentence, not just the colour. It says which failure it was, and they need different fixes.
- If it is a credential, the card has a Settings link straight to the form. Paste a new one, save, then press Check now.
- If it is a refused file, look at the file. StockBoss says what it refused and why. See Why it refuses a file.
- If it is your supplier being down, do nothing. Your figures are untouched and the next run picks up where this one left off.
For everything else that can look wrong, troubleshooting walks the usual suspects.
Nothing is written while a supplier is in trouble, so a red card is not an emergency. Your products keep the last figures anyone believed.