Attendance & Check-in
Three related screens cover attendance, depending on what you’re tracking:
| Screen | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Attendance | Recording who attended an event, ministry activity, or small group meeting — the general-purpose roster tool. |
| Check-in | A fast front-desk flow for services/events open to anyone — search, check in, print a tag. |
| Kids Check-in | The same front-desk flow, but restricted to minors, with a matching guardian tag. |
All three ultimately write to the same underlying attendance records, so a session started in one shows up correctly in the others’ history too.
Attendance
Section titled “Attendance”+ Take attendance → choose what you’re taking attendance for:
- Service/Event — pick from events in the last/next 90 days.
- Ministry activity — pick the activity and a date (a weekly activity is one series, so you pick which week).
- Small group meeting — pick the group and a date; a meeting record is created automatically if one doesn’t exist yet for that date.
The roster pre-fills from the relevant membership list (a group’s members, or a ministry’s members from Ministry Members) — events have no membership concept, so their roster starts empty. A search box lets you add anyone by name regardless, useful for a substitute or a first-time attendee. Mark each person Present, Absent, Late or Excused (or Mark all present), then Save attendance — nothing is written until you save.
Each person also has Note, for a short comment such as “traveling” or “first time bringing a friend”; it’s saved with their attendance.
The sessions list shows your recent sessions with a present/total count; click one to reopen and edit it.
Trends, above the list, shows the average number present per session for each of the last 6 months (hover a bar for how many sessions and the average for events, ministry activities and small groups). Under it, HolyCRM lists the people who came 3 or more times and not in the last 4 weeks — a ready list for a pastoral call.
Check-in
Section titled “Check-in”A faster flow for a service, conference, or any event not restricted to minors. Pick a type (Service/Event or Ministry activity) and a date, then search and tap to check someone in — this prints a tag with a short pickup code. If the occurrence is an event with people pre-registered (see Events & Registrations), they show up in a Pre-registered shortcut list above the search box.
Kids Check-in
Section titled “Kids Check-in”The same flow, but only ever surfaces minors as checkable — an adult who isn’t a minor and isn’t listed as anyone’s guardian never appears in search results at all. Searching by a parent’s name finds their children (via the Guardians field set on the child’s own Member record — see Members); searching by a child’s own name finds them directly.
Checking a child in prints two matching tags — one for the child, one for the guardian — each showing the same pickup code large enough to read across a table. At pickup, a volunteer compares the guardian’s tag stub against the child’s, and taps Check out.
If the selected ministry session has an age band set (see Ministries & Ministry Members), only children within that age range are offered, even if they’re a minor by the church-wide definition.
There’s no scanner or label printer integration — a “tag” is a piece of paper from your regular printer, and the security model is a human visually comparing two printed codes. That matches how most churches already run paper tag stubs; this just keeps the record digital.
Paging a guardian
Section titled “Paging a guardian”In Check out, each child with a guardian on file has Page guardian. It sends the guardian a notification on their phone asking them to come, showing the session and their tag’s code (never the child’s name). The row shows when they were last paged.
After paging, the guardian’s phone number appears with Call them and WhatsApp (a ready-to-send message from your own WhatsApp, with the session and code). If the app couldn’t reach their phone, the screen says so: call or message them instead. If it did, those buttons are there in case they don’t answer.
Setting up who counts as a minor
Section titled “Setting up who counts as a minor”See Members — a member is a minor once their birth date is below your church’s configured cutoff (Church Settings → Minor age cutoff), or via a manual checkbox if they have no birth date on file. Guardians can only be set on someone once they’re marked a minor.
Roadmap
Section titled “Roadmap”Editing or removing a guardian link from the check-in screen itself (do that from the child’s own Member record instead), running multiple simultaneous check-in sessions on one screen, and hardware scanner/printer integration.