Attendance & sessions
Recording attendance is Attendlr's everyday move: you mark who was at the session. Everything else builds on top of it: pass session counts, debts and stats.
Exercises: on Pro you can add exercises from your own exercise library to a session, with that day's values. The Exercises guide explains how.
- Open the session, or create a new one.
- Tap the name of each student who was present in the roster.
- It saves instantly: there's no separate save button.
When you create a session you pick the class type first. It fills in the title and duration for you, and the rest of the form only appears afterwards, so you never type something the app would have filled in anyway. The less-used fields (description, exercises, tags and the Show in calendar switch) sit at the bottom of the form under More details: tap its heading to open it. If any of them already holds something, for example when you edit or copy a session, it starts open, so nothing stays hidden.
Description: on the session page, tap the Description card to write straight away, without opening the full form. The cursor starts at the end of the text, so you can simply add today's notes, and the New item button starts a new line with a dash. Lines starting with a dash (-) show as a bulleted list, lines like 1. as a numbered list, and a long description opens with Show more. If the class type has a description, Insert class type description adds it in one tap: if you've already written something, it goes after it on a new line, so nothing is lost. The same action is on the session form too, as an icon at the right edge of the Description field in the More details section; the app never fills in the description by itself. On a session that belongs to a series, you choose in this window before saving: Only this one (the default) or This and following. With the latter, a later session that already has its own, different description keeps it; after saving, the app tells you how many sessions were updated and how many kept theirs. On an archived session the description is read-only. Available on every plan.
Every session belongs to a class type and a location. That's why it's worth setting those up first. After that, creating a session is just a couple of taps.
Age range: on the class type form, the Min. age and Max. age fields set who the class is for (say 9–14), or just one end (14+, up to 12). It's only a hint and never stops anyone: when you pick students for a session (recording attendance, quick attendance or the session form), a student outside the range gets a grey line under their name with their age and that they're outside the age range. Age is worked out on the session's date; students with no birthday get no hint. Available on every plan.
Quick attendance entry: copy a previous session's roster, so with a regular group you don't have to look everyone up one by one. It works on every plan: Free lets you copy the most recent session, Basic and up let you pick from the last ten.
You can see your sessions in four views and switch between them at the top of the Sessions page: List, Month, Week and Day. List is the day list with the week strip; the other three are the calendar. All four show the same day: a day you pick in one is the day in the others, and the + button adds a new session on it. Month shows the whole month, with the selected day's sessions below. In Week and Day, each session sits at its start time, as tall as it is long, so free time and overlaps show at a glance: sessions at the same time sit side by side. Search and the filters (favorites, tags) work in all four views; in Month, for example, only the matching sessions keep their dots. If you open the filters on a small screen, the month shrinks to one week and the List week strip to the selected day, so the day's sessions keep their room; close the filters and the whole month is back, still filtered. Archived sessions show in the List view. Swipe or use the arrows to move along; in Week, tap a day to open it in Day. Tap a session to open it, or tap an empty spot to add a new session at that time. Under Settings → Sessions → Calendar view you can choose the hours the day shows; if a session falls outside them, that week or day stretches so it still shows. The calendar view is available from the Basic plan up.
You can also copy a session: in its ⋮ menu (or with a long-press on the session in the list), choose Duplicate. You pick when (next week, today or another day) and whether the attendees come along: as booked, or, for today or an earlier day, as attended. Saved as attended, pass credits are used just as if you marked them by hand. Then you get the filled-in form, where you can still change anything. Duplicating sessions works on every plan; on Free the copy counts toward the 20 sessions a month. The Add to Google Calendar button on the session page (also on every plan) puts the session in your calendar; it's a one-off copy, so later changes to the session won't show there.
If you want all your sessions to appear and stay up to date in your calendar on their own, use Calendar sync (Settings → Sessions → Calendar sync, on the Premium plan). With the Add to Google Calendar button or by pasting the link, a separate Attendlr calendar appears that follows new, moved, cancelled and deleted sessions too. Google doesn't let you add a calendar from a link on a phone, so there the button walks you through the steps: you send the link to yourself, add the calendar on a computer, and on Android turn on sync for the new calendar in Google Calendar's settings, because Google adds it switched off. Your calendar app decides how often it refreshes: Google Calendar usually re-reads it every few hours, sometimes only once a day. In a class type's settings (Calendar section) you can keep that class type out of the calendar, or use the booked student's name as the title for private sessions; to leave out a single session, turn off Show in calendar in the More details section of its form. The link is secret, but anyone who knows it can see your schedule; Make a new link revokes the old one at any time.
On the Calendar sync page you can create several calendars (up to five), each with its own name and the class types you pick, for example group classes and private sessions apart. Each has its own link, so in Google Calendar it becomes a separate calendar with its own colour. If you kept your calendar by hand until now, set the day you switch in the Sync starts on field: sessions before it are left out, so your old entries get no duplicates; delete your future hand-made entries. Under How far back, choose 1 month, 3 months or 1 year; anything older disappears from the calendar. Deleting a calendar also revokes its link. While a session is in one of your synced calendars, its page shows a note instead of the Add to Google Calendar button, so it doesn't end up there twice.
Recurring sessions: when you create a session, choose Weekly or Every 2 weeks under Repeat, tick the days (for example Mon and Wed), and set when it ends: on a date or after a number of sessions. Before saving you see how many sessions will be created and over which dates; at most 100 sessions and 6 months at once. Each one is a normal session of its own, so you can cancel or change them one by one. When you edit or delete a session of a series, the app asks whether to change only this one or the following ones too; sessions that already have attendance or payments are kept by a bulk delete. Extend series adds more sessions in the same rhythm. Recurring sessions are available from the Basic plan up.
Clash warning: if a new session falls at the same time as another of your sessions, the app tells you when you save and lists what it clashes with. Save anyway still saves it; Cancel takes you back to the form. For a recurring session you get one warning listing every clashing date. Extend series and This and following edits warn too, and editing a session only warns when its time, duration or location changed. Under Settings → Sessions you can switch it off, or have it warn only when 3, 4 or 5 sessions run at once (handy if you run parallel classes on purpose). You can also choose whether only the same start time or any overlap counts as a clash, and whether sessions at other locations count; sessions with no location always count. Cancelled and archived sessions never count. Available on every plan.
Attendee breakdown: a session's Breakdown tab shows who came, by age (youngest, oldest and average, worked out on the session's date), gender, nationality, tags, and which visit it was for each person. Only people who attended count, not cancellation charges. The age and visit groups fit your group: one bar per year for a narrow age range, 5- or 10-year bands for a mixed one. First visit always has its own row, so you see at once who to welcome. Tap a row to see who's in it (in an age or visit band, each name shows that person's own age or visit number), and go on to a student's profile from there. Anything missing (say, no birthday) goes in the Not set row. If the class type has an age range, the age bands wholly outside it show in a different colour, and an Outside the age range row under them shows how many came from outside it (tap it for their names). Students with no birthday aren't counted in it. The attendee breakdown comes with Pro.
If a session doesn't happen, cancel it. Cancelling asks who cancelled: if the students did (the default), the session is charged to them as a cancellation fee; if you did, nobody is charged and any attendance already recorded is returned to the passes. You can override who's charged on a per-student basis.