Group attendance
Tracking who comes to your home groups, classes, and fellowship circles is what makes a group roster more than a name list. GCM doesn't ship a separate "group attendance" table — group attendance flows through the same Attendance module that records Sunday service, but with a different meeting tag.
This article explains how the model works, how to record group attendance week-to-week, and the key differences from org-wide service attendance.
Group attendance is just attendance with a meeting tag
There's one attendances table. Every row is "this member was present at this meeting on this date." What makes a row a group attendance vs. a service attendance is which meeting it points at:
- Sunday Service — meeting tagged with no group → counts as org-wide service attendance.
- Tuesday Westside Home Group — meeting tagged with the Tuesday Westside group → counts as group attendance for that group.
So the question of "how do I track group attendance?" reduces to configure a meeting for each group, then mark attendance against that meeting like any other.
Set up a meeting for the group
- Open Calendar → Meetings.
- Click Add meeting.
- Fill in:
- Name — match the group name so leaders can find it. E.g. Tuesday Westside Home Group.
- Day / time — when the group meets. (This is the structured schedule for the calendar; the free-text meeting day / time / location on the group record is for human-readable display.)
- Group — pick the group from the dropdown. This is the key tag — it's what links the attendance to the group's report.
- Org unit — same campus/branch as the group, if your hierarchy is configured.
- Save.
From now on, every attendance record marked against this meeting carries the group_id (via the meeting) and feeds the group's reports.
TIP
One meeting per group is the common pattern. If a group meets in two formats — e.g. Tuesday Westside meets weekly at the host's home and once a month at a restaurant — keep it as one meeting in GCM and use the date to disambiguate. Two meetings for the same group fragments the report and double-counts members.
Mark group attendance week-to-week
There are three modes — the same three the org uses for Sunday attendance, all documented under Attendance:
1. Bulk marking (recommended for small groups)
The fastest path for a 10-person home group.
- From the leader's phone or tablet, open Attendance.
- Pick the date and the group's meeting.
- The members card shows everyone on the group's roster — tap to toggle present. Tap Select all if everyone came.
- Save.
See Bulk attendance for the full walkthrough.
2. Manual entry (for back-filling)
If a leader forgot to mark attendance on Tuesday and is catching up on Friday, manual entry is the right path. It supports back-dating the attendance row to the actual meeting date.
See Manual attendance.
3. Check-in station (rare for groups)
Most home groups don't run a check-in station — it's overkill for 8 people in someone's living room. But for classes — a 50-person Bible study, a new-believers cohort — the check-in station on an iPad at the door works just as well as on Sunday morning. Set the station's meeting to the group's meeting and you're done.
How group attendance differs from service attendance
Same table, same shape, but different lenses on the data:
| Service attendance | Group attendance | |
|---|---|---|
| Roster denominator | Everyone in the org | Members of the specific group |
| Typical cadence | Weekly, single event | Variable per group — weekly, bi-weekly, monthly |
| Used in lost-member math | Yes (any missed week counts) | Yes, but you can scope the lost-member rule to a group |
| Surfaces on member profile | Yes — Attendance tab | Yes — same Attendance tab, no separate "group" subtab |
| Charted on dashboards | Yes — Attendance Trend widget | Yes — Engagement widget supports per-group filter |
| Affects engagement score | Yes | Yes |
The two streams share infrastructure but answer different pastoral questions: service attendance answers "is this person still showing up at all?", group attendance answers "is this person plugged in to small-group community?"
A member can be on the service-attendance list every week and still drift in group attendance — they show up Sunday morning but stopped coming to Tuesday home group two months ago. That's an early signal of disengagement, and group-scoped attendance is what surfaces it.
What counts as present
Same rules as anywhere else in attendance:
- Counted: members marked present.
- Not counted: members marked absent or with no record at all.
- Not counted: visitors who came to the group meeting but aren't members yet. (Register them as members first; back-mark attendance.)
- Not counted: members on the group's roster but at a meeting not tagged with this group.
That last rule is the same gotcha as with Ministry attendance: if the home group met but no one marked attendance against the correctly-tagged meeting, the chart can't see it. Marking the right meeting is what makes the data flow.
Reading the group's attendance chart
Open the group's detail page from Groups. Below the header card and roster, the attendance chart shows attendance counts over time for every meeting tagged with this group.
The chart filters:
- Meeting — leave blank to see every meeting tagged with this group, or pick one specific meeting if you've created multiple.
- Start date — defaults to one month ago.
- End date — defaults to today.
Each bar is one occurrence of the meeting. Hover for the exact date and count. Click a bar to drill into the underlying attendance records on the Attendance page — useful when a number looks off and you need to see the individual rows.
Cross-checking the roster
A common question: "the roster has 18 people but only 9 are in this week's bar — what happened?"
Three usual culprits:
- Roster includes inactive members. Some people on the join table haven't actually come in months. Use Active vs lost members to clean up.
- Some weeks weren't marked. Attendance only counts what was recorded. A leader who forgot to mark Tuesday won't show up on the chart for Tuesday.
- Wrong meeting filter. If you filtered to the wrong meeting, you're looking at a subset.
Permissions
| Action | Required permission |
|---|---|
| Mark group attendance | attendance.write (same as service attendance) |
| Read group attendance chart on group detail | groups.view + attendance.view |
| Drill into individual attendance records | attendance.view |
A unit-scoped shepherd can mark and read attendance for groups within their unit scope, the same as for any other meeting. The group's attendance chart respects attendance permissions: if a user can see the group but not attendance, the chart is blank (or hidden).
Next steps
- Group reporting — roster trends and exports across groups.
- Attendance overview — the full Attendance module if you're new to it.
- Bulk attendance — the fastest path for small group meetings.
- Compare with Ministry attendance — the analogous flow on the ministries side.