Why it refuses a file

When StockBoss refuses a file, nothing is written to your products. Your figures stay exactly as they were, the supplier’s card says what happened, the history keeps the reason and an email goes out.

That is the correct answer, not a failure: whatever your figures were yesterday is far closer to the truth than a bad file.

What gets refused

A file that has shrunk by half. The most common shape of a bad morning. If your supplier’s export listed 40,000 products last time and 12,000 today, that is a partial download, not news about your stock. The first run is never refused this way, because there is nothing to compare it to yet.

An error page, a login page or a maintenance notice. However healthy the reply code looks. Some suppliers answer an expired credential with their sign-in page, served with a perfectly good 200 OK. StockBoss treats “well formed, but not stock” as a failure, never as an empty file. When a web page comes back where stock should be, the message says so and points at the likely fix, usually the credential.

An empty list. A feed with nothing in it is a broken feed. Applied as though it meant something, it sets your whole catalogue to nothing on a run that reports success.

A file with no quantities in it. An order export and a product list both parse perfectly and both have codes in them. Neither is stock. Those are refused and told what they are missing, rather than a vague failure that leaves you guessing.

A failed fetch. A connection that never landed is not an empty file, and the two are reported differently because they need different fixes.

What is not a refusal

A code missing from today’s file means leave that product alone. Suppliers drop lines for all sorts of uninteresting reasons, and a shop that reads absence as zero closes itself a little more every day.

A negative quantity is a supplier telling you they are oversold upstream. That is real information. StockBoss keeps what they said and sells nothing.

A capped figure like 500+ is a quantity, not junk. Refused as unreadable it would silently freeze exactly the best-stocked lines in the catalogue.

A stale file on your own server is a warning rather than a refusal. If the file has not been updated for a day, StockBoss applies it and tells you how old it is, because old figures still beat no figures.

A refusal never becomes the new normal

When a file is refused, the size it is judged against is not updated.

That rule matters more than it looks. Without it, night one’s half file gets refused, but night two treats half as the expected size and lets it through. By night three your shop has closed, with every check reporting success.

When you disagree

Sometimes a refusal is wrong. A supplier genuinely discontinuing a third of their range in one go looks exactly like a bad export.

There is no button that waves a refused file through, deliberately. What the screen gives you is the reason and the numbers, so you can look at the file yourself. Once the supplier publishes a full file again, the next run applies normally and your shop catches up on its own.

Certain a refusal is wrong, and it is blocking you? Tell us which supplier and what the message said. We would rather look at a real example with you than add an override button that gets pressed on the wrong morning.

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Next: health, history and alerts covers where a refusal shows up on the board and the email that tells you about it.