We have several canned reports in QuickSchools under the “Summary Reports” module, related to Attendance. Here’s a quick list of the most relevant reports::

• Attendance Summary
• Attendance Exceptions
• Attendance Not Yet Taken
• Consolidated Attendance

Attendance Summary

This is the main report used to view all attendance records. There are several filters available:

And there are several Report Variations available:

Note that each Report Variation is simply reformatting the data in a different way. But they all work off the same data, based on the filters applied to the report. All Summary Reports work this way. Here’s an example Report Variation of the “Attendance Summary” report called “Attendance Detail”:

Some things to note about the “Attendance Summary” report:

• Depending on whether you use homeroom or subject-based attendance, you may see several periods per day, per student.
• We recently added a filter for “Valid Attendance”, which will filter records based on the Enrollment Date of the student. So for example, if you accidentally took attendance before a students enrollment date, or if you change the enrollment date after attendance was taken, this filter would either remove/include invalid attendance records by comparing the attendance date with the student’s enrollment date.
• When a student is marked “Tardy”, only the “Tardy” column is marked (not the Present Column”). This is consistent with the Attendance Roster as well as the Attendance Profile. What this means is, when you look at the “Total Present”, it excludes the tardies. And the “Total Present” actually represents “Present and Not Tardy”. To view consolidated Attendance data where Tardy is also considered Present, check out the “Consolidated Attendance” report (See below).

Attendance Exceptions

As indicated in the description, this report shows all attendance records where the student is not Present, as well as records where a comment was included in the attendance record. This report provides a quick view on attendance-related events, since most students should be marked Present by default.

Some things to note about the “Attendance Exceptions” report:

• The attendance records have automatically been filtered to exclude invalid attendance records (similar to the “Attendance Summary”). So attendance taken BEFORE the enrollment date of the student will be excluded. If an enrollment date is not set for the student, then the report will show all attendance records to that student. 

Attendance Not Yet Taken

This is by far the most confusing data to report on, especially when multiple-subjects are at play since there are several criteria that constitutes “Not Yet Taken”. We will be writing a separate article with more detail on how this works. In general though, you can expect “Not Yet Taken” records to be created in the following situations:

• At least one teacher has taken attendance for a particular day, but another teacher has not. So attendance for the teacher who has not taken attendance will be marked “Not Yet Taken”. NOTE: If all teachers do not take attendance for a particular day, then it gets marked as “Not a School Day” (even if students were physically in class that day).
• By default, when a student is added to a class, the attendance record is set as “Not a school day”. But if a teacher takes attendance for any period where the student is included, then the remaining periods for that student will be marked “Not yet taken”. This is particularly relevant, if a teacher has already taken attendance for a class that the student was recently enrolled in.

Again, we will discuss these scenarios in more detail in another article.

Consolidated Attendance

Finally, the “Consolidated Attendance” report combines different attendance statuses in order to produce a unified value for total present and total absent.

Notice that this report does not show “Tardy”, “Tardy with Excuse” or “Absent with Excuse”. That’s because these entries have been combined into the main “Present” and “Absent” headings. There is also a separate variation to show the values in terms of percentages:

Some things to note about the “Consolidated Attendance” report:

• Both “Tardy” and “Tardy with Excuse” are considered “Present”
• “Absent with Excuse” is also considered “Absent”

If you have special criteria for calculating attendance based on rules (for example, 3 Tardies = 1 Absent), we will have separate reports for that. Or you can extract the raw data from the “Attendance Summary” report mentioned above, and perform your calculations externally via Excel.