Before the sync writes a single employee, it first loads some lookup data it needs from HCSS: the company's Business Units and its active Pay Classes. This step is called preload. If that lookup returns empty, the sync cannot safely continue, so it stops the entire process right there rather than writing incomplete employee records.
Error Message
| Message text | Direction | Occurs when | Outcome | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Failures on Preload. | Write | During setup, before any employee is written, the sync's lookup of Business Units came back empty, or the lookup of active Pay Classes came back empty after checking every Business Unit that was found. | Sync stopped. No employees were added or updated in this run. | Confirm Business Units and active Pay Classes exist in HCSS, then rerun the sync. |
Which Preload Step Caused Error
The setup step loads four things: Business Units, Employee HR data, Employee Personal data, and Pay Classes. Only two of the four can actually cause this message: Business Units and Pay Classes. The other two always report success, no matter what they find, and can be ruled out immediately.
In practice, that leaves two real causes: no Business Units exist for the company in HCSS, or Business Units exist, but none of them have an active Pay Class.
| Preload Step | Can It Cause The Error | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| Business Units lookup | Yes | HCSS returned no Business Units at all for this company. This also empties the two lookups below, since both of them only look at Business Units that were found here. |
| Employee HR Information load | No | This step always reports success on completion, even if it retrieved no HR records for any Business Unit. |
| Employee Personal Information load | No | This step also always reports success on completion, even if it retrieved no personal data. |
| Pay Classes load | Yes | After checking every Business Unit that was found, no Pay Class came back marked active. If the Business Units lookup already came back empty, this step never gets the chance to find anything, so it fails too. |
Confirming the Error
- Open the sync execution for the attempt.
- Open the step for the HCSS connector.
- Find the Employee entity row for that step. Check the Added, Updated, and Unchanged columns. They will all read zero, because the sync stopped during setup, before any employee record was read or written.
- Check the Failures column for that run. This message logs as a Failure, not as a per-entity Error, Warning, or Information count, because it stops the whole run rather than skipping individual records.
- Open the detail for that Failure entry and confirm the text reads "Failures on Preload."
- Read the setup messages logged just before the failure. They appear in this fixed order: "Preloading data needed for sync..", then "Employee preload has started retrieving Employee HR data." followed by "Employee preload has successfully retrieved Employee HR data.", then the same start and complete pair for "Employee Personal data", then the same start and complete pair for "Pay Classes data".
- The Business Units lookup has no start or complete message of its own. If it is the cause, the log will jump straight from "Preloading data needed for sync.." to the Employee HR data start message, with nothing about Business Units in between.
- The Employee HR data and Employee Personal data steps log their complete message regardless of whether they found any records, so seeing both complete messages does not confirm they succeeded and does not point to the cause either way.
- A missing complete message for the Pay Classes step is the strongest signal that step did not finish. If all four expected messages for HR data, Personal data, and Pay Classes are present and the failure still occurred, the most likely cause is an empty Business Units or Pay Classes result rather than a step that did not finish.
Resolving the Error
The fix happens in HCSS, not in Arcoro. Confirm the connector was able to authenticate before troubleshooting this further. Preload only runs after the connection to HCSS succeeds, so if authentication or connector configuration is broken, that is a separate problem with its own article, not this one.
If No Business Units Were Found
- Open HCSS and confirm at least one Business Unit is set up for the company being synced.
- If none exist, create at least one Business Unit in HCSS.
- Rerun the sync and confirm the Failure no longer appears, and the Employee entity now shows Added, Updated, or Unchanged counts.
If Business Units Exist, But No Active Pay Class Was Found
- Open HCSS and check the Pay Classes for each Business Unit being synced.
- If no Pay Class exists, or every Pay Class is marked inactive, add or reactivate at least one Pay Class in HCSS.
- Rerun the sync and confirm the Failure no longer appears, and the Employee entity now shows Added, Updated, or Unchanged counts.
This is the most likely outcome for this message: a genuine data gap in HCSS rather than a problem with Arcoro's connector.
When to Escalate
If any of the following occur, you may need to reach out to Arcoro support for additional assistance.
- You have confirmed that both Business Units and active Pay Classes exist in HCSS, but the failure still occurs on rerun.
- If the setup messages show a step's start message with no complete message following it, this points to a call that did not finish rather than a simple empty result, which may require deeper investigation.
- If you cannot tell from the setup messages which step was involved at all, for example, if the log view does not show the setup messages described above.