Common issues and resolutions
The reports we see most often, what they usually turn out to be, and what to do about them. Most are resolved by the service desk in a few minutes. Each area links to the full guide behind it.
The triage question for any peripheral: does it work outside Smart Squad? If the printer cannot print its own self-test page, or the device cannot see the scanner at the OS level, the fault is hardware, pairing or MDM policy — the application is never involved. That one question resolves most peripheral reports before anything else is tried.
Printing
Full setup, pairing and configuration: Brother, Zebra mobile and Zebra desktop printer guides.
- A ticket prints completely blank
- Thermal paper loaded upside down. Re-insert it the right way round.
- The printer prints its self-test, but nothing from the app
- Pairing or Bluetooth permission. Mobile printers hold one active pairing, so if another officer’s device paired to it the original pairing was silently dropped. Unpair and re-pair, and confirm the app still holds Bluetooth / nearby-devices permission — OS updates and MDM pushes can revoke it.
- Tickets print, but misformatted or split across two pages
- Someone printed to that printer from a Windows computer. The app relies on settings stored on the printer itself, and printing from Windows silently overwrites them. Restore the printer’s settings and keep fleet mobile printers out of Windows print queues. No amount of Bluetooth troubleshooting will find this one.
- Every printer or scanner in the fleet failed at once
- An MDM or Bluetooth policy change, or an app deployment — not hardware. A policy restricting Bluetooth, limiting pairing to allow-listed devices, or blocking the printer’s device class breaks printing agency-wide overnight and looks exactly like an application failure.
Licence scanners
Scanner checks in full: Tier-1 troubleshooting guide, section 7.2.
- Licence scans produce nothing at all
- Scanner or pairing. Confirm the OS sees the device first. For keyboard-wedge scanners, scan into a plain text field — but check with your administrator which mode your fleet uses, because some models integrate directly with the app and will never produce text elsewhere.
- Only out-of-province or out-of-state licences fail to scan
- A different barcode format. Note the issuing jurisdiction when you escalate — that detail is what makes it actionable.
Workstations and the browser client
- Peripherals fail on a workstation using the browser client
- The Smart Squad Tray is not running or is being blocked. The browser cannot reach printers, scanners or GPS directly. If peripherals stopped after a patch cycle, a Windows, browser or endpoint-protection update has removed or blocked it — reinstall.
- An external GPS receiver stopped being seen
- Confirm the receiver is paired and that the correct source is selected. Pairing and setup are in the GPS receiver setup guide.
Network, map and real-time
On-premise agencies: the firewall allow-list and required endpoints are in the on-premise preparation guide.
- The map is blank or grey, everything else works
- Map tiles are being blocked by a firewall, TLS inspection or a split-tunnel VPN rule rather than anything in the app.
- An officer is not showing on the map
- Location Sharing is switched off in that officer’s app settings.
- Messages or alerts arrive late, or stop after a few minutes
- The real-time connection is being closed — most often a VPN idle timeout or a firewall that does not keep WebSocket connections open.
- It works on cellular but not on Wi-Fi, or the reverse
- The network path, not the device. Compare what the two paths allow — this is almost always a firewall, proxy or inspection rule on one side only.
Records, queries and uploads
- Small actions work, but large uploads or attachments fail
- Usually VPN fragmentation (MTU), device storage, or storage on the server. The pattern to report is the size threshold at which it starts failing.
- Uploads are stuck and items are pending on the device
- Escalate to us before anyone reinstalls the app. Pending items live on the device, and a reinstall can take them with it.
- Person or vehicle queries fail, but the rest of the app works
- The RMS integration or the interface service, rather than Smart Squad itself. If only external queries fail while RMS lookups succeed, the external system or the path to it is the place to look.
- A search returns fewer results than expected
- Masterfiling and search matching rules decide what a query returns. The masterfiling rules document sets out how names, dates of birth and addresses are matched.
Accounts and change windows
- One user cannot log in, but everyone else can
- Account lockout, a device certificate, or device clock drift. If nobody can log in, look at the server, the VPN or a TLS certificate instead.
- Everything broke after a change window
- Start with the change. Tell us what changed and when — it is the fastest route to a fix.
Still stuck
The Tier-1 troubleshooting guide carries the full checklists behind every item on this page, along with what to gather before escalating — sending that with the ticket is what turns a long diagnosis into a short one. When you are ready to raise it with us, contact support.
Setup, configuration and device documentation lives on the administrator documentation page. For cloud-hosted agencies, current service state is on the service status page.