Utilising the transactions report to monitor and resume failed transmissions

When a policy, MTA or renewal is purchased via CFS there are a number of operations that need to complete in a specific order, for example a policy line needs to be created in your back office, documents attached, emails sent, etc. Unfortunately there are occasions when one or more of these operations may fail - the client's internet connection may drop, they may close the window, or a configuration property may prevent succesful takeup, the Transactions report enables to you monitor any failed transmissions and resume transmission where necessary.

The setup for the transactions report couldn't be simpler, just enable the "Transactions" report in the system token editor using the CFS Console, you'll then see a new menu option appear to launch the report.

By default the report will show you transactions for all sources for the past 30 days. You can use the filter option in the toolbar to chose your own date range, show specific sources (New business, MTA or Renewal) and optionally to show failed transactions only.

A failed transaction is defined as one where the most recently executed stage resulted in an error. These are different from stalled / ongoing transactions whereby the transmission has not completed fully, but the most recent stage did not error.

The Transactions menu item will display an icon (as shown above) if there are any failed transactions in the past 7 days.

The report will highlight any failed rows in red, and any stalled/ongoing rows in amber, along with an accompanying icon to illustrate it's status. Although stalled rows should be resumed if not updated for more than 24 hours it's important that failed rows are resumed without delay.

The first step is to view the error associated with the transmission. Simply click the icon next to the current stage text to bring up a modal showing diagnostics. The information contained within this message is fundamental to help the support and development team to diagnose your issue, but there's some common errors you may be able to solve yourself, look out for these phrases in the text:

• "SMTP server" – if the stage is Send Emails or Logging it's likely the error occured as a result of trying to send an email, either to an EDI drop location or to the client. Check the SMTP config entered for your scheme - has anything changed recently that may prevent emails being sent, e.g. email account password, email configuration, etc.
• "the field is too small" - most likely caused by a very long client name or declared item without proper defined validation, please check the values entered in the question set and report to Durell.
• "Remote_nonquery Error" - these errors can look intimidating, but are most commonly caused by the connection to your back office database being interrupted - try resuming the transaction.

For failed and stalled transactions you have 2 options available via the menu:

• Resume - attempt to resume the transmission from the previous stage. If you believe you have resolved the previous error message, it was a one-off or have been asked to do so by a member of the support team.

• Ignore - if the transaction was a test and doesn't need to be completed you can ignore it, this will prevent it from showing up in the failed report and prevent it from being included in the alert notifcation on the menu item, but it will still be displayed on the full report with an option to resume.