Trails
Syncing data from Xero Practice Manager requires a lot of moving parts – synchronized clocks, caches, third-party plugins – just to name a few.
**Trails** are a powerful and creative way to get around limitations imposed by various cloud apps, and part of what makes SyncHub such a powerful tool.
Trails can be created by selecting the table name from your connection dashboard.
Consider these two common uses of trails:
### Problem 1: You're using another third-party plugin in Xero Practice Manager
That plugin creates or modifies new records but does not sync them back to Xero Practice Manager immediately. Instead, it bulk-loads them at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, SyncHub has been busy checking for "modified" records every hour. Without Trails, once each hour has passed, we mark that period as synced and do not check it again.
This means that at the end of the day when the new records are bulk-loaded, they are never detected by us and therefore never appear in your reports.
**Solution:** Create a Trail that backdates 24 hours.
### Problem 2: Xero Practice Manager doesn't have a modification flag
You're busy creating new records in Xero Practice Manager. SyncHub picks them up and all is well. But when you modify the record, you find that the changes aren't coming through to us.
It turns out that Xero Practice Manager doesn't mark records as "modified" when they are changed, and therefore our modification checks do not detect your changes.
**Solution:** Create a Trail that backdates six months. This will re-check all items "created" (not modified) in the last six months and re-sync them. (This is of course fairly inefficient, but needs must).