If you get a “Partial Success” message in Amalgam, that means that while your data was valid as far as our app could tell, one or more errors occurred when sending that data to its destination. This is usually a result of rules put in place by the app that Amalgam isn’t able to check on our end.
When this happens Amalgam puts the message QuickBooks sends back into the yellow message box, which will hopefully make the process of figuring out what went wrong easier. However, these messages can be confusing at times.
Stale Object Errors
QuickBooks is a platform where multiple people can be logged in at once and editing data, and the app wants to prevent those people from creating conflicting versions of the same data. For example, if one user edits an invoice to remove tax, and another user invoice changes the due date from that invoice, QuickBooks won’t know which of these changes (or both) to keep.
To prevent this, it uses the rule that the first user that starts editing “wins,” meaning their changes are the ones that stay in the app.
The outcome of this for Amalgam users is a confusing message something like: “Stale Object Error: You and [Person] were working on this at the same time. [Person] finished before you did, so your work was not saved. Because of the strange way QuickBooks tracks users, the person in the message sometimes isn’t even on the working team.
This error sometimes occurs even if the user in question didn’t actually make any edits. Sometimes even opening the invoice, bill, etc. in the QuickBooks website is enough to prompt QuickBooks to think there is a data sync issue.
Sync Tokens
The hidden system that tracks this is called the “Sync Token.” Every record has one, and every time an “update” is made, that Sync Token goes up by one. You can find this number in a hidden cell on the left side of most QuickBooks resources. If you get this error, it means that the SyncToken in the sheet is not the same as the latest one QuickBooks has in its system.
Usually, if the SyncToken is out of date, this can be solved in one of two ways:
- Use the “Download” option to download the latest version of the records, with the latest SyncToken. Note, this will overwrite any formulas in the sheet, but it will ensure you are working on the most up-to-date data
- Simply increment by one the SyncTokens of the records in question until you succeed. Note: make sure you are certain there have not been any changes made to these records since you last updated them with your sheet, because this will simply overwrite those changes