Online Attendance Management System Software for Student

Manual roll-calling or paper-based attendance management systems are tedious and time-consuming and require extra effort to maintain them. An online attendance management system is an ideal tool that digitalises the attendance-taking process.

Educational institutes can use the system to record students, staff, and faculty attendance and track employee work hours efficiently. Furthermore, it helps to maintain an accurate record and eliminate the risk of manual errors.

But what is an online attendance management system and how does it contribute to regulating student’s attendance? Let us find out:

What is an Attendance Management System?

An attendance management system (AMS) is an advanced software solution that has been developed to track, record, and manage attendance digitally. It utilises modern mechanisms such as RFID, biometric scanners, GPS tracking, and facial recognition to automate the process effectively.

What’s more, students or staff cannot buddy punch or do proxy attendance on behalf of someone else, eliminating fraudulent practices. The admin or teachers can generate attendance reports, helping to monitor the pace of absent and present days for each student. Institutes can establish mandatory attendance and determine whether students adhere to it via the tool.

Simultaneously, institutes can utilise the system to track working hours, overtime, and leave records of various employees. Furthermore, the automation of attendance reduces administrative work overload, freeing up time that the staff can use for other important activities.

Key Features of Attendance Management System

1. Automated Attendance Taking

Teachers don’t need to call out students’ names and record them as present or absent, which usually takes time. Institutes can integrate RFID scanners with the AMS, allowing students to scan their ID cards with RFID tags, capturing their attendance automatically. Similarly, they can scan their thumb on the biometric scanner and mark themselves present for that particular day/date. The system then records the data, ensuring accuracy and preventing errors and inaccuracies.

2. Payroll Integration

Integrating online attendance management with the payroll management system simplifies the long and elaborate process of calculating employee hours and salaries. The software automatically records the data when staff and faculty record their attendance through biometric/RFID scanners, etc. The integration facilitates the automatic transfer of attendance data and the auto-calculation of salaries by including specific deductions, overtime, and bonuses. The payroll software credits the salary to the employees’ accounts, generates payslips, and sends automated messages.

3. Leave and Absence Management

Applying for leaves manually and waiting for the authorized personnel to revert back with approval or disapproval is a time-consuming process. Fortunately, employees can submit their leave of absence application through the software leave management platform. The institute's management can review the applications online and approve or reject them based on the institute’s policies and availability. Furthermore, the platform allows them to define and categorize different kinds of leaves, including medical, emergency, maternity, paternity, etc.

They can use the system to configure the attendance policies within the system and send a self-explanatory document explaining the rules about the same. Also, employees can check the number of leaves they have taken and the leave balances, enabling them to plan accordingly.

4. Policy Implementation and Reporting

Frequent absenteeism and leaves of absence can become commonplace in educational institutes, especially due to the lack of strict policies. On the other hand, despite the prevalence of mandatory attendance rules, students continue to miss their classes and remain absent.

That is where they can leverage the attendance management system to implement the attendance policies effectively. For instance, the system generates reports, showcasing daily, weekly, and monthly attendance summaries, helping to track absenteeism trends and common grounds for missing classes. The system generates an automated alert when students’ absent days go beyond a certain parameter, helping to identify at-risk students. Hence, they can develop and implement appropriate student retention strategies.

5. Interoperability

Most modern attendance management systems support integration with other tools, given that they have standard data formats and APIs. Consequently, it will integrate with other important systems like payroll management, finance, or account management systems.

Moreover, it eliminates data redundancy and errors and facilitates a smooth transfer of data from one platform to another. In effect, institute leaders or management can gain insights into the overall workflow productivity.

6. Cloud Technology

AMS is a cloud-enabled software that backs up data automatically in the remote server, eliminating manual intervention. Also, it facilitates high scalability, thereby accommodating immense data with the gradual expansion of the institute while ensuring data accuracy and improved productivity.

Types of Attendance Management Systems

1. RFID Attendance Management System

RFID or Radio Frequency Identification is one of the most prominent technologies used to automate attendance-tracking procedures. It includes the following mechanisms:

• Institutes provide each student with an RFID card that has a unique identification number.
• Institutes place the RFID device at the entrance of the school, library, and classroom.
• Students need to scan their smart cards through the device, which will read the unique identification number and mark their attendance accordingly.
• RFID’s robust technology is capable of scanning multiple smart cards, ensuring uninterrupted attendance marking.
• The integration of the RFID device with school or college ERP software leads to easy access to student attendance details without any delays.

2. Biometric Attendance Management System

The biometric attendance management system utilizes unique biological characteristics such as iris scans, facial recognition, and fingerprints to record attendance in the following ways:

• Students, faculty, and staff register themselves by scanning their fingers.
• They need to place their fingers on the biometric device, which verifies it with the original fingerprint, thereby marking their attendance.
• The biometric attendance system prevents proxy attendance, ensures accuracy, and reduces manual errors.

3. School App Attendance Management System

School mobile applications have emerged as an important tool that facilitates effective communication between teachers, students, and parents. Furthermore, integrating the attendance management system with the school app leads to:

• Digital marking of students’ attendance within just a matter of a few minutes and paperless maintenance of the attendance.
• Parents can send leave requests directly through the school app, which can automatically mark the student as "on leave" if they are absent.
• The app sends auto-triggered messages and notifications to parents, informing them about their children’s whereabouts.

Advantages of Online Attendance Management System

• AMS facilitates a hassle-free mechanism to record student attendance, eliminating the manual or paper-based system, thereby saving time and resources.
• Ensures data accuracy and provides real-time insights into frequent absenteeism and attendance trends.
• Integration of attendance and payroll management streamlines the accurate calculation and payment of timely salaries.
• Real-time data analysis of attendance trends and patterns to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing policies and implement corrective measures accordingly.
• Maintains the productive workflow of the institute through timely intervention in case of frequent absenteeism, reducing administrative burden, and improving resource allocation.

How does MasterSoft improve the institute’s attendance management?

MasterSoft’s Online Attendance Management system software is a robust tool that enables institutes to streamline end-to-end attendance management through its easy-to-use features. It is a highly scalable solution that offers:

• Supports mobile-based, QR code-based, biometric-based, and RFID-based attendance management systems.
• Insightful data analytics.
• Smooth payroll integration.
• Higher institutional ROI.
• Real-time attendance tracking.