How the release gate works
When you enter Certificate of Analysis results on a lot, SKU.io compares each value against that product's Quality Spec and reaches one verdict for the whole lot. That verdict is not just a label — one of the four outcomes takes the lot's stock off sale automatically.
This page explains what each verdict means, which one moves stock, and the two rules that stop the gate doing something surprising.
The four verdicts
| Verdict | What it means | What happens to the stock |
|---|---|---|
| COA passed | Every required analyte has a result, and every result is inside its limit | Nothing. The lot stays sellable |
| COA out of spec | At least one result is outside its limit | The lot is quarantined |
| COA incomplete | A required analyte still has no result | Nothing. The lot stays sellable |
| No specification | The product has no Quality Spec, so there is nothing to judge against | Nothing |
A single failing analyte is enough. There is no partial pass — if one required limit is breached, the lot is out of spec.
Why incomplete does not quarantine
This is the part people expect to work the other way, so it's worth being direct about it.
An incomplete result is a data-entry gap, not a quality failure. Somebody has entered three of four analytes and hasn't finished. Quarantining stock for that would punish the person doing the paperwork, and the lesson every operator would draw is don't start entering results at all — which loses you the entire record.
So an incomplete lot stays sellable, and reads as missing a COA. If you want the stock held while you chase the missing number, place a stock hold yourself. That's a deliberate act, and it's recorded as one.
What quarantine actually does
Quarantine puts the lot's remaining units on a quality-control stock hold. The units stay physically where they are and no stock movement is recorded — nothing is written off, nothing moves warehouse. What changes is that the held units drop out of available-to-promise, so they can't be allocated to an order or shipped.
It is fully reversible. That's deliberate: a lot pulled over a bad result is often released a week later when the retest comes back clean, and a disposition you can't undo would make people reluctant to use the gate at all.
You'll see the quarantine in three places: a Quarantined chip on the lot, a banner on the lot's own page linking to the hold, and the hold itself on Inventory → Stock Holds.
The Available Qty figure on a lot's Details tab is layer accounting — the units the lot started with, minus the units already fulfilled from it. It is not available-to-promise, so it keeps counting units that a hold has taken off sale. The quarantine banner above it says so, which is why that banner exists.
The two rules that keep the gate predictable
A corrected result releases only the quarantine it caused
If you re-enter results and the lot now passes, the quarantine is lifted automatically. Without that, a corrected certificate would leave the stock stranded behind a hold nobody remembered to release.
But SKU.io only releases a hold this gate placed. A lot can also be held because it's near expiry, because a pallet was damaged, because of a recall, or because somebody placed a hold by hand. Releasing one of those just because an unrelated COA came back clean would put stock back on sale that nobody cleared — which is the exact thing the hold existed to prevent. Those holds stay until a person releases them.
Editing a spec never re-judges history
Each result stores the limit it was judged against at the moment it was entered. Change a limit on the Quality Spec afterwards and the lots already judged keep their original verdicts — the new limit applies to results entered from then on.
This matters because the alternative is worse. If tightening a limit silently re-judged the past, a lot you released and shipped six months ago could flip to "out of spec" on a screen today, with no way to tell whether it was ever actually out of spec when you made the call. The Quality Spec tab tells you how many lots have already been judged under the current spec before you change anything.
What the gate does not do
- It never blocks a purchase order. Supplier compliance is advisory everywhere it appears — see Track supplier certificates.
- It never judges a lot with no spec. Set one on the product's Quality Spec tab first, or results have nothing to be measured against.
- It doesn't verify identity for you. A supplier's certificate is their claim about the material. Recording your own check is a separate, deliberate act — see Record COA results.
Next steps
- Set a product quality spec — the limits the gate judges against
- Record COA results — entering the values that trigger it
- Place a stock hold — holding stock yourself, for any reason
- Stock states — how held stock relates to available-to-promise