Online Attendance Management System Software for Students

In today's competitive world, with increasing working hours and less classroom time, teachers need edTech tools which help them manage precious class time efficiently. Instead of focusing on teaching, faculty members are often stuck with completing formal duties, for e.g. taking daily student attendance.

Manually taking attendance and registering it in files & musters makes the daily attendance a mundane task for the faculty and unnecessarily consumes classroom time.

To overcome such inefficient work processes, there are various school software systems available to speed up the attendance process and reduce manual work.

An online attendance management system or digital attendance platform is one of them, which is developed to automate the daily attendance in schools. Additionally, it helps to maintain accurate records and generate summarized student attendance reports.

What is Attendance Management System?

The attendance management system is a tool that keeps track of employee and student attendance in institutes. It gives complete data about the time the students are present in the institute and the time they take off. This process can be conducted by recording student and employee hours using online attendance software for your company.

An attendance management system is used by an organization to track staff's time and attendance details. You can save time and effort by calculating your employee's working hours with an accurate attendance management system.

A school attendance management system is a solution that conducts tracking, monitoring, and compiling daily student attendance data through an online medium. It enables the faculty to record and maintain 100% accurate student attendance reports, attendance history, absentee records, & other activities within a few clicks.

Attendance management system keeps track of daily attendance, working hours, breaks, login, and logout time. It prevents staff's time theft. An attendance management system integrates all attendance devices such as smart cards, biometric, and facial recognition devices in real-time.

Attendance management system records and maintains student’s attendance data using smart devices. The system collects attendance records in the system and manages, stores and processes the data.

It generates daily attendance reports that help the faculty to track student’s presence with high accuracy and efficiency. Student attendance system helps teachers to mark online attendance of students during class & reduce manual work.

It is used to track student's attendance, absentee record, attendance history & other related documents. Student attendance software allows you to record & manage daily student attendance to speed up the daily attendance process.

Online attendance management system enables school administrators to record, manage & compile daily student attendance data. Along with student attendance, this software also allows teachers to generate 100% accurate student attendance reports.

What Is the Importance of an Attendance Management System?

Track Performance of the Staff:

The software helps the institute to check the overall performance of the faculty as it monitors the check in and check out timing of the employees. The overall working hours further help the HR team to know the overall pay during the payroll process.

Easy Payroll Processing:

Human error resulting in inaccurate attendance records can cause you to spend more money on overtime payments. The software offers highly accurate results, thus helping to lower the burden of extra payments to employees.

Effectively Calculate the Rate of Absenteeism:

The software helps in knowing the employee’s rate of absence, which allows the institute to know when substitute teachers are required to fill in for the absent faculty. It also helps in maintaining student discipline as the absenteeism is notified to parents and teachers.

What are the types of Attendance Management System?

There are various methods of automating the attendance process and schools can choose a system that suits their requirements the best.

Here are the best ways to automate student attendance in schools...

1: RFID Attendance Management System

The most popular technology in automating attendance is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

This student attendance management system uses the following simple mechanism and marks attendance of the entire class within seconds:

• Each student is given a smart RFID card having a unique identification number.
• The RFID can be installed at the entrance of the school, classroom, library or any other important location.
• Students carrying their smart cards simply have to pass through the reader and the reader scans their unique identification number and hence the attendance is marked automatically.
• Since the RFID reader is capable of reading several cards at once, the attendance of multiple students is marked simultaneously.
• The data from the RFID reader is automatically fetched by the integrated school ERP software. Hence, the schools get the access to student attendance details of every class and section at once.

2: Biometric Attendance Management System

Another useful electronic attendance system for students that saves efforts, as well as time, is - the biometric system. It works in the following way:

• The fingerprint of each student is saved in the biometric system which is integrated with an educational ERP system.
• The students simply need to place their finger on the biometric and upon verification with the original fingerprint input stored in the system, their attendance is marked.
• Since a biometric system works on fingerprints, which are unique for every individual, there are lesser chances of false or proxy attendance. This makes the biometric system quite accurate and a highly reliable attendance management system.

Just like the RFID system, the student data from the biometric is also fetched by the educational ERP and hence can be accessed, viewed, and managed by the concerned authorities in real-time.

3: School App Attendance Management System

School mobile apps not just provide seamless communication between parents and teachers, but can also help in managing student attendance.

Integrating a school app in educational ERP software is a great way to reduce a teacher’s hassles because of the following three major reasons.

• Firstly, a teacher can mark attendance in less than a minute with an effective school management app.
• Secondly, it enables parents to directly send in the leave applications of their kids via the school app. The students who are on leave appear as ‘on-leave’ in the app while marking attendance, and the teacher does not have to think twice about that student status. This largely reduces a teacher’s time and efforts.
• Thirdly, an auto-triggered message or app push notification can be sent via the school transportation app to inform parents about their child’s whereabouts while traveling. This further ensures student security & safety.

Why Online Attendance Management System?

The objective of the school attendance software is to reduce the time that is consumed when attendance is taken manually. Unlike the manual process, an online system easily helps management to analyze student’s attendance details as per requirement.

A detailed summary of student attendance history can be obtained in an instant.

3 Key Advantages Of Attendance Management System

• User-Friendly: The user interface is very simple. Data storage and recovery is fast and secure. Additionally, graphic reports are available which makes interpretation of data simple and easy to grasp.
• Quick Report Generation: Various reports such as Student-wise attendance, Day-wise attendance, Class-wise attendance, Month-Wise, Class-Attendance, and much more. can be easily generated quickly. Current and back-dated reports are available readily.
• Zero Errors: Reduction of paperwork and elimination of errors is possible when attendance is automated.

What Are the Key Features of an Attendance Management System?

Some of the prominent features an attendance management system should have are:

Check-In and Check-Out Features:

Manual time cards can be inefficient, can be misplaced, and are also prone to errors. An automated attendance software should include reading the clock in and out and the breaks the employees or students take in between. This helps in keeping a detailed track of the movement of both staff and students.

Payroll Integration:

With payroll integration, the attendance management system helps in quickly integrating the attendance and leaves of the faculty, which thereby simplifies the overall payroll process. The payroll is then calculated with the number of working days or hours the employee has been present.

Employee Leave Management:

The attendance management system should come with a leave management functionality, wherein the faculty or student can apply for sick leave, earned leave, vacation leave, etc., which can then be reflected in the monthly attendance records. This further simplifies the payroll process as the leaves are taken into consideration.

Policy Implementation and Reporting

The institutes can ensure policy and regulatory compliance by configuring the rules in the software. To prevent any compliance issues and to keep up with changing compliance norms, colleges and schools must streamline timesheets and time-off processes with automated attendance management software.

Software Integration and Reporting

It seamlessly integrates with payroll, finance, accounting, and leave management systems. Syncing with other software prevents repetitive data entry and manual data reconciliation and duplication. This significantly reduces administrative workload, prevents payroll errors, improves productivity, and ensures data accuracy.

Cloud Support

With constant cloud backups, the attendance data is backed up on a regular basis, thereby ensuring data security. Also, with cloud support and high scalability, the college can store tons of data with quick retrieval capabilities, which is not possible with bulk paper documentation of student records.

What Are the Benefits of Attendance Management Systems?

Some of the major benefits that the institutes can witness after adopting the Attendance Management System are:

Reduce Costs

• Hassle-Free Attendance Management
• Integrated Payroll and Leave Management
• Save Time By Preventing Repetitive Tasks
• Increased Productivity with Reduced Overhead Costs

Increase Accuracy and Data Security

• Error-Free Attendance Tracking
• Automation Prevents Human Error
• Role-Based Login Access
• Backups in the Cloud

Review Analytics

• Data-Driven Decision Making
• Real-Time Attendance Analysis
• Powerful BI-Based Dashboards
• Generate Visual Reports

Why Should You Have Attendance Management Systems for Your Institute or Organization?

Attendance is one of the crucial activities in an institute that gives a clear and transparent picture of the participation of students in day-to-day activities, thereby having a direct impact on their academic performance.

Poor attendance can have a substantial impact on their ability to grasp the course content. Furthermore, it can affect their discipline. Also, the faculty and administrative staff need to be monitored to ensure there is a flexible teaching environment.

Some of the most common reasons for switching to automated attendance tracking software are:

• There is less transparency regarding student attendance among the stakeholders—parents, teachers, and students
• High chance of proxy attendance
• Finding a substitute teacher when a faculty member is absent is difficult.
• Time-consuming retrieval of student attendance records
• The lengthy and error-prone payroll process

The traditional attendance process can be cumbersome and time-consuming with lengthy roll-call processes, which can further affect the productivity of teachers. Moreover, the process is inefficient and there is a high chance of students' proxy.

This can be prevented by shifting to a seamless Attendance Management System, which can streamline the attendance process and considerably lower the faculty’s burden.

What Are The Major Offerings Of Attendance Management Software?

The online attendance management software keeps track of student attendance over years and generates data and reports for a large number of students over the given data. Students, faculty members, and admin can access the software based on their roles and responsibilities.

Students/Parents- They can get access to the attendance record, number of absent days with dates, and get absent notifications.

Admin- Admin makes sure that the system is working fine and offering high security and safety of the data generated every day

Faculty – The faculty can get access to the defaulter students and generate attendance reports in all the required formats.

How Does Automated Attendance Management System Work?

• The institute either makes use of a biometric system, RFID device, or attendance software for marking students’ attendance.
• The RFID and biometric system collect student attendance using an RFID card or eye/face scan automatically.
• The teacher has to herself put absent and present markings while using attendance management software.
• The software collects attendance data and stores it on a cloud-based system.
• The system can be accessed by the teachers, students, and parents using separate credentials as per their role.
• It sends SMS/email notifications to the parents when the students are absent.

Tips While Choosing an Attendance Management System

With hundreds of ERP vendors out there, it can be confusing and challenging to choose a suitable attendance management software.

The institute should look for a software that helps in effectively streamlining the attendance tracking process, provides 100% transparency of the total number of attendance hours, eliminates missed punches, and improves overall efficiency.

Key Tips to Consider While Choosing a Suitable Attendance Management Software:

High Scalability

With an increasing number of enrollments, the software must be equipped with high scalability functionality that can store large amounts of data with ease.

Affordability

Cost is one of the prime factors while choosing an ERP software. Along with the necessary functions, the software must be affordable and reliable.

High Flexibility

The software must be adaptable and comprehensive. Students and faculty should be able to check their attendance records as well as be able to track the total hours.

High Accuracy & Ease of Use

The attendance tracking should be highly accurate and must record only attendance via a secure biometric tracker, which ensures 100% precision. The portal should be user-friendly, and any required training regarding its usage must be provided post-implementation of the software.

Smooth Integration

The attendance management system should be easily integrated with different software such as payroll, HRMS, leave management systems, etc. to prevent repetitive data entry and improve transparency among every department.

Cloud-Based

With soaring technology development and an increasing need for data security, the attendance management system should be cloud-based so that the data can be safely stored and retrieved whenever required.