When a license-plate camera opens the gate for a plate it shouldn't have, or refuses a plate that should have worked, the cause is almost always in how the plate was read or matched. This is the staff-side companion to the resident article "Why didn't my license plate open the gate?" — it covers both a wrong open and a missed open, and what you can change. First, the one fact that explains most of it: the cameras read the plate number only, never the issuing state, and matching is exact on that number (spaces and dashes ignored).
The gate opened for the wrong plate
A vehicle got in that shouldn't have. Two things cause this:
- A number collision. Because the state isn't read, a plate with the same number as a registered resident vehicle or an active visitor pass — even one issued in another state — matches. The system will not open when two active records share a number (it can't tell them apart, so it declines and alerts a guard), but a single stored plate that happens to collide with a passing vehicle can open.
- A misread. A worn, angled, or partly obscured plate can be read as a character or two off and land on a real record by chance.
What to do: Open LPR History (sidebar: Plate Reads), search the plate and filter by gate, match type, or alert, then review the read in the Captures list — the stored plate-read image shows exactly what the camera saw. Confirm which resident vehicle or pass it matched. If it was a genuine collision, note the plate; if the same wrong vehicle keeps triggering, add its plate to the Denied List so it's refused regardless. If reads at that lane are frequently wrong, treat it as a camera problem (angle, glare, distance) and consider turning Auto-open off for that gate until the reads are clean — every automatic open ultimately fires the gate relay, so a bad lane should not be trusted to open on its own.
The gate didn't open for a plate that should work
Walk these in order — the first two are the most common:
- Matching is off. On the LPR Settings card (LPR Cameras page), Auto-match vehicles must be on to match resident plates, and Auto-match visitors to match plates on active passes.
- Auto-open is off for that gate. Auto-open is switched on per gate, on the Gate form — Auto-open for residents and Auto-open for visitors are independent, and both are off until turned on. The section only appears once the gate has a webhook (relay) configured.
- The camera faces the wrong way. Only entrance (inbound) cameras auto-open; confirm the camera's direction is assigned to this gate.
- The plate isn't on file, or doesn't match exactly. For a resident, the plate must be on their vehicle record; for a guest, it must be on a pass. One wrong or missing character is a miss.
- A visitor pass isn't active right now. A guest plate opens only within the pass's valid window, and delivery/service passes open once and then won't again.
- A look-alike made it ambiguous. If two active passes carry the same number, the system declines on purpose and alerts a guard rather than guess.
- The plate is flagged. A denied, watch-listed, or BOLO plate never auto-opens by design — check the Denied List and Watchlist. A plate on the host resident's own Do Not Allow list is refused the same way when it arrives with a pass for that unit or is registered to it.
When in doubt, let a person decide
The system is built to fail shut: anything it can't confirm stays closed and a guard is alerted. That's the safe default. If auto-open is giving you trouble at one lane, roll it back to guard-admitted entry there, fix the camera or the records, and re-enable it once the reads in LPR History are consistently correct. For the full configuration, see "Set up license-plate (LPR) auto-open and BOLO / banned plates" and "Set up a gate and its access rules."