The banner is red
What red actually means, what to check, and why it is almost never a reason to stop working.
2 min read
Red means this machine has not reached the rest of the hospital for over an hour, or has never reached it at all.
First: keep working
Registering patients, seeing them, charging them, taking payments and printing receipts all work exactly as normal. Nothing is lost. Everything you do is recorded on this machine and queued, and it will go when a connection returns.
What you should be careful about is information that comes from other machines — the queue, another department's activity, a balance a different desk may have taken money against.
Then: check which red it is
The banner says which.
"Alone — not synced yet" — this machine has never reached anything. On a newly installed machine, expect it. On one that worked yesterday, something changed.
"Stale — last synced N hours ago" — it used to work.
"Not all sent" — a different problem entirely, and a more serious one. See Some writes were refused.
What to check, in order
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Is the hub on? The machine that stays on, usually in the office. If it has been switched off or has crashed, every station goes amber and then red even though the network is fine.
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Is this machine on the hospital's network? Wi-Fi dropped, cable out, switch off.
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Is there internet? Only matters if the hub is unreachable — with the hub up, machines sync over your own network and the internet is irrelevant.
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Look at System / Devices on this machine. It lists what it can see: the hub, other machines, when each was last heard from. That usually says immediately whether this machine is isolated or the hub is down.
When it comes back
Nothing to do. The queue drains on its own, the banner goes green, and everything done during the outage lands exactly once — including everything the other machines did while you could not see them.
How long can this go on?
A full day has been tested end to end, with the internet cut, the hub off for part of it and a machine reinstalled from nothing, and everything reconciled afterwards. A red banner is a thing to fix, not an emergency.