Attendance Reports

Recording attendance is only half of it. This guide covers reading it back: the daily register, term summaries, absence patterns, and how DRAIS decides whether a learner counts as present, late or absent.

How present, late and absent are decided

DRAIS keeps every scan exactly as it happened, then applies your school's rules on top. The rules live in Settings → Attendance and are yours to set.

Present	A scan arrived within the window your school considers on time.
Late	A scan arrived after the cut-off time you configured. Still present — but counted separately, so lateness is visible rather than hidden inside a presence figure.
Absent	No scan for that learner on a day the school was open to them.
Excused	Marked by staff — sickness, permission, a school trip. Excused days are separated from unexplained absence in every summary.

Rules apply at reading time, not recording time

If you change your late cut-off from 8:00 to 8:15, past attendance is re-read under the new rule. The underlying scans never change — only the interpretation. This is what lets a school adjust its policy without corrupting its history.

The daily register

Go to Attendance → Daily, choose a class and a date. You get the register as your teachers expect it: every learner, their status, and the actual arrival time where there was a scan.

Sort by status to see absences together.
Mark excused absences directly in the register.
Add a manual entry for a learner whose scan failed — it is recorded as manual, not passed off as a device reading.
Export or print for filing.

[ Screenshot: Daily register for a class ]

Replace with actual screenshot

Tip

The distinction between a device scan and a manual entry is preserved everywhere. When an inspector asks how you know a learner was present, you can answer precisely — and a register that is entirely manual entries looks different from one that is entirely scans, which is exactly as it should be.

Live attendance

Attendance → Live shows arrivals as they happen. During the morning rush you see each learner appear with their name, class and photo seconds after they scan.

Schools use it for:

confirming a newly enrolled fingerprint works, without waiting for a report;
spotting a device that has stopped reporting mid-morning;
a visible presence at the gate on the first days of term.

Term summaries

Attendance → Summary gives the figures that go into report cards and board meetings: days open, days attended, days absent, days late, and attendance percentage — per learner, per class, or for the whole school.

Per learner	Goes onto the report card. Parents ask about this one.
Per class	Compare classes and streams. Useful for identifying a class with a pattern rather than a problem child.
Whole school	The headline figure, and the trend across terms.

Finding patterns

The reports most worth running are the ones that surface a problem before anyone complains:

Consecutive absence — learners absent several days running. Often the first sign a child has quietly stopped coming.
Chronic lateness — repeatedly late but never absent, so never flagged by a presence figure.
Day-of-week patterns — absence clustered on particular days.
Never scanned — learners with no scan all term. Usually an enrolment problem, not an attendance problem: check their fingerprint status first.

Read a zero carefully

A learner showing 0% attendance is far more likely to have a broken fingerprint link than to have missed an entire term. Check the learner profile's fingerprint panel before contacting the family.

Attendance on report cards

Attendance figures can be printed on report cards — days attended out of days open, and a percentage. The values are frozen into the report card when it is generated, so a reprint shows the same figures as the original. See Report Cards.

Exporting

Every attendance view can be exported for your own records or for a ministry return. Where a report is going outside the school, print or export it from DRAIS rather than retyping — the figures then match what the system holds, and can be checked against it later.