Watch an introductory video here:

https://youtu.be/k91ggbs9l4E

What is an Attendance Transaction?

When a student is given attendance within Genesis, Attendance Transactions will keep records of each posted attendance for the student.

For instance, if a student checks in late to school, a Tardy would be posted to the student.

That tardy will be posted as the student’s Daily Attendance and a transaction record is created for the student. Later in the day, that same student needs to check out of school to go to the doctor.

When the attendance is recorded for the student, a Left Early code will be posted to the student’s Daily Attendance and another transaction will be created to record that the student left school.

The student will now have two transactions, one for the Tardy and one for the Left Early.

This allows the system to keep track of the amount of total time that a student has been in school and keeps a record that the student was Tardy.

Below we will explain how those transaction records are used to update your students attendance.

Transactions are only created for attendance that records a Time.

Transaction Rules

Transaction Rules allow you to create parameters on how long a student needs to be in school for any given day.

Based on your parameters, a student who attends less than X minutes within a given school day will be given a Half Day Absent or a Full Day Absent.

The amount of time is completely configurable by you.

In addition, the rules can be created for different school day lengths. If you have a Full Day of school, you may want any student who has less than 2 hours of school to receive a Full Day Absence.

However, on a Delayed Opening, that student should receive a Half Day absence due to the total school hours that day.

For that reason, we allow you to define the rules based on school days length, so you can have different rules based on the school day.

How Rules are Applied

Transaction Rules are applied to students either automatically by using the Daily Attendance Transactions Task or the rules can be applied manually by your attendance administrators.

Daily Attendance Transactions Task

The Daily Attendance Transactions Task runs once per day at a time of your choosing. What the task does it to go through each of the transactions recorded for the day.

For each student with a recorded transaction, the task will determine the amount of time the student has been in school. The task will then compare that total to the amount of time required within each of the rules for the day.

If the task find a rule that the student qualified for, the attendance code that has been defined in that rule will be applied to the student.

In the above example, the student has two transactions for the day. The Daily Attendance for the student will be the last attendance posted to the student, which in this case is a Left Early code.

The task will look at the students transactions and calculate the total minutes between the time he or she entered the school, and the time they left. The total number of minutes is then compared to the minimum and maximum amount of minutes for each for the rules.

In this case, we’ll say the student was only in school for an hour so they will qualify for the Full Day Absent rule which has the Full Day Absence attendance code mapped to it. So now we have an attendance code to post to the student but one issue remains.

The problem now is that Daily Attendance code within the rule does not reflect that the student was also Tardy. In order to solve that, there is an option that will create a new attendance code based on the Full Day Absence that is also a Tardy.

So instead of using the Full Day Absence code, a new code of Full Day Absence (w/ Unex Tardy) will be created and then used to be posted to the student. The student will now count as both Tardy and Absent for the day.

In a second example using the above student, let’s look at how the task handles students who do not qualify for a rule, but have a Tardy posted for when they entered school.

In this case, the task will bypass all the rules because the student was in school for long enough to qualify for a Full Day present.

However, the last attendance posted to that student was Left Early, which does not reflect the original Tardy the student had entering school.

In this case, the task will determine that the student needs to be marked as Tardy and will apply the student’s Tardy transaction to the student for the Daily Attendance.

Manually Applying Transaction Rules

If you prefer to allow you attendance administrators manually check and post the attendance for your students, you can do this in mass on the Attendance>Transactions Search screen.

When you pull up the students, each student with a transaction within the school will appear on the screen. The rules are analyzed for each of the students in the search results, so you will see a real time view of what attendance code should be posted to the student.

If the attendance that should be posted is different than the attendance the student has, a Post Attendance button will appear on the screen that will allow the user to update the student.

Transactions Setup

Options are available on the Attendance>Transactions>Setup>Transaction Setup screen.

This screen is school based which means that enabling the transactions from here only apply to the school that you are currently in.

This allows you to enable or disable this feature based on the needs of each school.

Option

Description

Enable Attendance Transactions

When this is checked, Transactions will be enabled for the school.

If student qualifies for Transaction Absence Rule AND has a tardy transaction for that day. Mark the student as BOTH absent and tardy. The system will automatically create an attendance code for an absence and tardy

If a student is tardy to school in the morning and then leaves later in the day, that student may qualify for a Full Day or Half Day Absence. In that case, the absence code from the rule will be posted to the student.

If this option is checked, another attendance code for this rule will be automatically created which will include a tardy, so the student will be marked both absent and tardy.

Example Student qualifies for a code of "1-Absent Full Day" because they were only in school for 2 hours of a day. If a tardy transaction is found for that day, then a new attendance code of "1UT - Absent Full Day (w Tardy)" will be created and posted to the student along with the tardy time from the tardy transaction.

School Start and End Times are determined by

Custom Defined Times

This allows you to configure the start and end time of your school for any Bell Schedules you have created. (Recommended)

Daily Schedule Periods

This determines the start and end times for school based on each student’s schedule. This should only be used if students within the same school attend school for different lengths of time.

Transaction Rules Setup

The transaction rules can be setup on the Attendance>Transactions>Setup>Transaction Rules screen.

The rules are what allows Genesis to apply the proper attendance code to the student after analyzing their transactions for the total time the student has spent in school.

The best way to start in this process is to automatically create some rules by clicking the button "Automatically Generate transaction Rules".

Option	Description
When School Day is	This allows you to configure the rule for the length of a school day.
Applied to Students Who	Attended More Than A student must attend school for more than X minutes in order to qualify for the rule. Attended Less Than A student must attend school for less than X minutes in order to qualify for the rule.
Attendance Code	This is the attendance code that will posted to the student if they qualify for the rule.
AM/PM	Does rule only apply to AM hours or PM hours. If both are selected, the rule applies to entire school day.
Grade Levels	If grades are selected, the rules will only be analyzed for students within the selected grades

Transaction Exclusions

If you have students whom you would like to exclude from transaction rules, you may set them individually to NOT to be included.

You do this from the student's Categories screen by checking off the "Exclude from Transaction Rules" field (this field is only visible if you have transactions enabled for your district).

If a student is marked with "Exclude from Transaction Rules", transactions will still be generated for the student but these transactions will never trigger a Transaction Rule from altering their daily attendance.