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Manage Attendance

How to set up and use the Attendance module in Music Monitor

Overview

Music Monitor's Attendance module allows you to record student and teacher attendance at scheduled lessons. Attendance records are created using information drawn from Enrolment records. They can then be used to inform calculations relating to payroll and billing.

An individual student's attendance record appears in the Attendance tab in the Students file.

Teachers can view and mark attendance records on their rolls.

Note that other work besides scheduled lessons can be added to teachers' rolls. For more information on this, see Pre-Approved Payments.

Settings

To use this module, you need to activate it in General Settings and set some options to suit your needs.

There are also settings to allow you to fine-tune what functions your teachers have access to.

Step through all the settings at Attendance Settings.

Attendance Codes

Create the codes your staff can use for roll marking, to indicate student presence or absence, teacher absence, etc.

For each code, you set whether the lesson is billable to the student, and whether it is payable to the teacher.

For more information see Set Up Attendance Codes.

Set Up Rolls

Ensemble Rolls

New Ensemble Rolls

*New in 2026!* Music Monitor version 10 offers New Ensemble Rolls. If you are using this option:

  • You do not need to set up the rolls. A roll will be created automatically for every Calendar Entry created for an ensemble.

  • If you do not use Calendar Entries, music teachers can easily create a roll for each rehearsal as they need it.

  • You do not need to add new students to the roll. Students whose enrolment is current in the week the roll relates to will appear automatically.

Old Ensemble Rolls

Ensembles rolls show the full term and should be set up at the start of each term.

When a new student joins an ensemble after the roll is set up, you can add them to the existing roll.

If you create a new ensemble after the other rolls have already been created, you can set up the roll for just that ensemble.

For a full explanation, see the article Set Up Ensemble Rolls.

Tuition Rolls

Tuition rolls change whenever a student starts or ends or changes a lesson, so tuition rolls need to be created each week.

*New in 2026!* In version 10 there is a script available on systems we host, that will automatically generate the weekly rolls on the Thursday of the week prior. See the main article for detail.

If something changes after the rolls are set up for the week, you can add, edit, or delete an individual attendance record and the change will be reflected on the roll.

Tuition Absences

You can mail merge an email to students marked as needing to receive this message. See Absentee Letters for guidance.

Colour Coding

Tuition rolls have colour coding relating to absences. This colour coding only appears on current rolls. Previous weeks' rolls do not show it.

The coding is as follows:

  • Orange shading means the student was absent last week

  • Red shading means they're absent again this week

  • Pale yellow shading means the roll record is unmarked (and is not affected by the above coding for absences)

  • Records lose their shading once marked, unless affected by the above coding for absences.

Marking Rolls

Admin staff can mark the rolls by going to Common Tasks > Roll Marking TUITION > Mark Rolls

The roll will look something like this.

Work through the roll, marking each lesson with the appropriate attendance code based on what actually happened.

If most of the records have the same code, you can use the green Mark All button to mark the whole roll in bulk, then change individually any records that need a different code.

The ensembles are highlighted in the yellowish colour you see in the bottom lines on this screenshot. Marking the ensemble on this roll indicates whether the whole class took place, and the teacher was present.

To mark the attendance of individual students at the ensemble, select the name of the ensemble to open up the roll for that ensemble.

TIP: If you need to mark another roll next, for this teacher or any other teacher, you can bring up the window to find the next roll just by selecting the Find Another Roll button in the black main bar. (You don't need to go back to the Common Tasks menu to run it again.)

There are guides available to help teachers navigate the roll marking with there access.

Attendance Records and Salaries

Music Monitor can calculate staff salaries based on information on the rolls.

For more information on the salaries module, see the articles in the Salaries help category.

Attendance Archives

You typically generate thousands ofAttendance records each year. If you kept all of these in your Attendance file it would become enormous and drag out processes in that file.

To avoid this, we recommend that you archive the old records once a year. Do this after you've finished any processes that depend on this information - such as billing reconciliation and payroll calculations. This keeps the records accessible but removes them from your current file that you work in often.

See Archive Attendance Records for guidance.

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