A quick tour of how attendance works in Playground — what gets tracked, where it lives, and how it connects to the rest of your account.

General Information

Playground tracks two kinds of attendance — student check-in/check-out and staff clock-in/clock-out. They're recorded separately and reported on separately.
Attendance can be recorded from the admin dashboard, the Playground mobile app, or a shared Kiosk device. All three write to the same record, so it doesn't matter which one your school uses day to day.
Every check-in and check-out is timestamped and attributed to whoever signed — a family member or a staff member. That signature trail is what licensing reports are built from.
Attendance is per-site. Each school has its own roster, its own Kiosk, and its own attendance settings.
Attendance doesn't just sit in reports — it feeds classroom ratios, overage billing, subsidy submissions, and payroll. More on that below.
Admins can edit or add attendance records after the fact, so a missed check-out doesn't leave a permanent gap in your records.

How Attendance Is Recorded

There are four ways attendance gets into Playground, and most schools use a mix of them.

Kiosk Mode — a locked-down tablet at your front door. Families sign in and out by scanning a QR code or entering their PIN. This is the most common setup for schools that want families signing for their own children.
Teacher check-in on mobile — teachers check students in and out from the Roster in the mobile app, one at a time or in bulk.
Contactless — a teacher sends a signature request to the guardian's own phone, and the guardian signs from the curb or the parking lot.
Admin dashboard — you can check students in and out, or correct existing records, from the Students tab on web.

💡 Signatures collected on a Kiosk or on a guardian's phone carry the same weight as a teacher-recorded check-in. You can require signatures for drop-off, pick-up, or both on a per-classroom basis.

For the full walkthrough of each method, see Log & Manage Student Attendance, Student Attendance for Teachers, and Manage Student Attendance as a Family.

Student Attendance

Your Students tab is the fastest place to see where everyone stands right now. The summary tiles at the top show how many students are Signed in, Signed out, and Absent today, and the Attendance status column tags each student as Checked in or Checked out. On mobile, teachers see the same thing as colored dots on the Roster — green for checked-in, red for checked-out, orange for absent.

To dig into one child's history, open their profile and go to the Activity tab. You'll find three logs there: the Attendance Log for daily check-ins and check-outs, the Program attendance log for program check-ins, and the Transition Log for classroom movement throughout the day.

Anything that looks wrong can be fixed from that same log. Opening a record gives you an Edit times window where you can adjust a check-in, add a missing check-out, or delete a record entirely.

Absences

An absence is Playground's way of saying "this child was scheduled today but isn't coming." Admins and teachers can record one from a student's profile, and families can submit their own from the mobile app if you've turned that on.

Absences come in three flavors — Full Day, Partial Day, and Multiple Days. A full-day absence marks the student absent on their schedule and overrides any hours they were logged as present. A partial-day absence splits their scheduled day around the absence window and leaves their check-in status as-is.

Recording an absence also creates an absence post on the Feed, which is how families see it. Deleting that post removes the absence.

Staff Attendance

Staff record their own time with clock-in and clock-out, just like families do with their students.

To review or correct anyone's time, open the Staff tab, pick a staff member, and go to the Hours tab. The History section lists every clock-in and clock-out, and the Record menu lets you add hours, log a training block, or record time off. Breaks are calculated automatically from the gap between a clock-out and the next clock-in, and they're excluded from both regular and billable hours.

Full detail lives in Manage & Edit Staff Attendance and Staff Schedules, Hours Reports, & Approving Time Off/PTO.

Live Attendance Views

Your Dashboard has three tabs that read directly off today's attendance, so you don't have to run a report to know what's happening on the floor.

Ratios — groups your classrooms by ratio status based on who's currently checked in and clocked in, showing Current versus Max, plus Staff and Students counts for each room. Rooms without a ratio target land under No ratio set.
Clocked hours — today's staff Hours, Time off, Billable hours, and Billable amount, with arrows to step through other days.
On my way — families who've signaled they're en route for pick-up.

Your Classrooms tab gives you the same picture room by room, with Students, Checked in, and Present ratio columns and a banner when a room is over capacity.

Related reading: Manage Classroom Ratios, Name to Face, and On My Way Queue For Admin.

Attendance Reports

Everything attendance-related is grouped under the Attendance category on your Reports tab. Pick a Report Type, set your date range, and click Generate Report — then Print for licensing or Export to pull the data into a spreadsheet.

A few you'll reach for most often:

Attendance - Daily	The licensing standard — sign-in/out with the signature of whoever signed, including morning and afternoon.
Attendance - Total time	How long each student was checked in per day.
Attendance Percentage	Attendance rates across a date range — useful for enrollment and utilization questions.
Scheduled hours	Scheduled hours compared against hours actually attended.
Ratio	Staff-to-student ratio broken out by time interval.
Daily Absences / No Shows	Who was marked absent, and who was scheduled but never checked in.
Blank Attendance	A printable paper sheet for days when you need to sign in by hand.

Staff time has its own home under the Staff Payroll reports. See Attendance Reports for the complete list and Payroll Reports for staff hours.

Attendance Settings

Your attendance rules live in the Attendance section of Settings → General. This is where you decide how much families can do on their own and how signing works at your door.

Kiosk Mode — launch Open kiosk mode, download the QR code for printing, and turn on Refresh QR code every minute if you want the code to rotate.
School PIN code — the code that locks and unlocks Kiosk Mode. This is separate from anyone's personal signing PIN.
Wellness check — require guardians to complete a health screening when signing in.
Contactless (Sign-in/out) — control whether signature requests can go to a guardian's own device instead of the school device.
Parents can mark absences — let families record absences for their own students.
On my way queue — turn the pick-up queue on or off.

Staff-side controls sit a little further down the same page under Teacher permissions — including Track staff current classroom, Restrict app access while clocked out, Restrict teacher check in hours, Round staff hours, and Staff hours close date. The Geofence setting near the top of Settings → General is what limits mobile check-ins to your physical location.

🚨 Round staff hours and Staff hours close date both affect historical records. Turning on rounding updates past timesheets, and setting a close date blocks edits to staff hours on or before that date.

Where Attendance Data Goes

Attendance is one of the most connected pieces of data in Playground. Once a check-in is recorded, it shows up in several other places automatically.

Ratios & capacity	Live ratio calculations use who is currently checked in and clocked in.
Billing	Time checked in past a student's scheduled hours drives overage fees, and absences open slots for drop-in care bookings.
Subsidy	Attendance records are the source for the data you submit to subsidy agencies.
Payroll	Staff clock-ins flow into Playground Payroll, and paid absences carry over automatically.
Door locks	Where connected, a Kiosk sign-in can trigger your door hardware.

Because so much depends on it, clean attendance is worth the attention. If your numbers look off, Resolve discrepancies and errors in attendance reports is the place to start.

Log & Manage Student Attendance — Kiosk setup, PIN and QR codes, recording and editing attendance, absences
Student Attendance for Teachers — single and bulk check-in, contactless, geofencing
Manage Student Attendance as a Family — what the experience looks like on the family side
Manage & Edit Staff Attendance — clock-in methods, editing hours, breaks, training time
Attendance Reports — every report type, printing, and exporting
Student Schedules — the schedules absences and overage fees are measured against
Manage Classroom Ratios — setting the ratio targets your Dashboard checks against
Manage & Submit Subsidy Attendance Data — sending attendance to subsidy agencies
Resolve discrepancies and errors in attendance reports — fixing mismatched numbers
Attendance Troubleshooting for Multi-Site Admins — org-level attendance issues

Attendance Overview