Sign In Systems and MIS Attendance Write Back

[donej]

I'm currently looking into alternative Staff and Visitor sign in management systems. We currently have Inventry but for various reasons are shopping around to see what else is on offer. So far we have had meetings with Sign In App and EntrySign.

 

There is one aspect of the sign in systems that I'm trying to get a definitive answer to. That is how the MIS write back functions between Bromcom and Sign in App or EntrySign for sixth form students. One of the main reasons that's prompted us to look elsewhere is that Inventry has completely stopped writing back attendance marks to Bromcom in the PM. This functionality stopped in February this year and Inventry have been completely unable to address and resolve the issue. Even going as far as to deny the functionality(Smart PM Scheduler) ever existed in the first place. https://support.inventry.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/360005281314-Sixth-Form-Smart-Scheduler-MIS-Write-Back-Information

 

With Inventry the sixth former would sign in the the Morning(AM session). They would be onsite all the way through to after mid day. They would be able to leave during lunch if they had no lessons after. As they leave the school site they would sign out of Inventry using the reason "Finished for the Day". The Smart PM Scheduler would see this sign out activity in what it has been told is the PM session. It would then know to write back to Bromcom an attendance mark in the PM period to say the student is educated off site. 

 

To complicate things further, we have just changed our PM attendance mark from the Period 5 session to P4. Therefore the statutory mark is filled in on site by a member of staff before the student is allowed to leave site at lunchtime. Therefore I believe we now need the mark to be only written to Period 5. 

 

Can anyone share their experience with either Sign In App or EntrySign and the functionality described above. Does either system support the functionality of writing back an attendance mark to Bromcom on the action of signing out? What period does the mark get written back to. i.e only AM/PM or also Periods 1-5?

 

Thanks for any information provided. This is one part of the sign in management I'm looking to get right before commiting to a new system. 

 

John

 

 

[psydii]

Attendance write back is *fraught* with problems.  Unless you (the architect of the system) tightly control how the humans behave on a day to day basis, marks you don't want to be will get overwritten. Every few years the org I work for has to re-learn  this lesson the hard way.  You can get it to work just fine when everybody involved understands  how it must be done and why they must not deviate from that practice.  But eventually someone new starts who, even though trained up, does not really understand why, and then a manager changes and the new manager is disinterested in understanding "why not" and then  things break and "everything is terrible and doesn't work and computers are unreliable"

This is platform agnostic.

[Synkrox]

We use signinapp. It registers the students and writes back to Bromcom with a comment and the time if they are present/late/after reg closed for AM or PM reg. When they sign out I don't believe it is recorded in Bromcom registers, as their AM reg is still valid. PM the same. (we don't do period reg). It won't overwrite marks already in the system.

 

 Perhaps you could do it through their timetable, so it doesn't expect a mark at all for free periods?

 

You can use the "signed out" list from signinapp to see quickly who has signed out if you needed to update reg marks manually.