Attendance
The Attendance module records who attended which meeting on which date. It looks simple from outside but powers a lot of the rest of GCM — the lost-members watchlist, dashboard charts, workflow triggers, and reports all read from this one table.
Meetings vs attendance
There are two pieces:
- A meeting is the recurring event your church runs — Sunday Worship, Wednesday Bible Study, Friday Cell. You define meetings once.
- An attendance is a single row recording that one member showed up to one meeting on one date.
You can have any number of meetings. Most churches start with one or two and grow from there.
Three ways to mark attendance
Pick the mode that fits the moment. You can mix and match — bulk marking on Sunday morning and manual entry on Wednesday is perfectly fine.
| Mode | Best for | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| Check-in station | Members self-tap on a tablet at the door | 10 min |
| Bulk marking | One staff member marks the whole congregation from a list | 0 min |
| Manual entry | One-at-a-time entry, often retroactive | 0 min |
The unique attendance row
GCM enforces one attendance per member, per meeting, per date at the database level. If you re-run a bulk mark on the same date, duplicates won't accumulate — we use an ON CONFLICT clause that updates the existing row rather than inserting a second.
INFO
This is important to know if you're scripting against the API: idempotent retries are safe by design.
What attendance powers
The act of marking attendance feeds:
- Dashboard charts — attendance trends, average per service, growth percentage.
- Member profile — every member's attendance tab and streak count.
- Lost-members watch — workflows that fire when a member hasn't attended for N weeks.
- Reports — attendance reports by meeting, unit, and date range.
- Demographics — what's the average age of who actually comes, not who's on the roll?
Permissions
| Action | Admin | Shepherd | Member |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create a meeting | yes | no | no |
| Mark attendance | yes | scoped to unit | self only |
| Remove an attendance | yes | scoped | no |
| Bulk-edit | yes | no | no |
| View reports | yes | scoped | personal |
A shepherd can mark attendance for any member inside their assigned org units. They cannot create meetings — that's an admin task.
Common questions
Can a member attend the same meeting twice on the same date? No — the database enforces uniqueness. If a member checks in twice (e.g. accidentally), the second one updates the timestamp rather than creating a new row.
What if our service runs across midnight? The attendance date is the meeting date, not the actual clock time. Mark for Saturday even if your members check in at 12:30 AM Sunday.
Does check-in work offline? Yes, if your church is on Growth-tier or higher and PowerSync is enabled. Marks queue locally and sync when WiFi returns.
Next steps
- Set up your first Sunday service — end-to-end recipe.
- Check-in station — hardware and configuration.
- Attendance reports — what the data reveals.