At last count nearly 50 churches were registered users of Time Clock MTS and we know that many of these use Time Clock MTS to track student attendance at Sunday school. The tracking requirements for a Sunday school are not too dissimilar to that needed for regular school attendance software but it’s worth some effort looking at how to use Time Clock MTS as Sunday school attendance software effectively.
Customize the User Interface
Using the Interface Settings Screen customize the main user interface to suit the Sunday school environment. Your students will likely be offended to be called employees, so change those labels to ‘students’, you might like to change the ‘clock in’ and ‘clock out’ to less work oriented terms too. I’d suggest ‘Arrive’ and ‘Depart’.
Customization for Sunday School Attendance
Create Jobs to Track Lessons or Classes
If you want to track your student attendance to various lessons then I’d suggest making use of the job tracking features of Time Clock MTS. So, if for example, you had a series of lessons on the various books of the New Testament you could assign each a code and have your students clock in and out with this code as they attend each different lesson. At the end of the series of lessons you could offer those students who missed out catch up sessions. Determining who missed out is very simple, just run the Job Time Report.
Create Departments for Each Teacher
If you run a larger Sunday school you might find it useful to track student attendance by teacher. To do this create a department representing each teacher and assign students to each department using the Manage Employees screens. You could then easily see a class list for each teacher and report on attendance to each teachers class by simply running Time Clock MTS attendance reports on a department by department basis.
Record Sunday School Attendance
Using Time Clock MTS to record Sunday school attendance is quite simple. You could do it in two ways. The first is to provide a central computer (or computers) and to have your students check in when they arrive for a class and then check out when they depart. Alternatively if your classes are smaller you might have the teachers take attendance on a laptop or similar and check each student in when roll is called at the beginning of class.
Report on Sunday School Attendance
If you make use of the Employee Status Report you’ll find that it’s a super quick and easy way to check what students are attending your Sunday school classes. If you’re wanting to track lesson attendance and you’ve made use of job tracking then the various job tracking reports will easily give you the information you need.
Conclusions
Time Clock MTS wasn’t really designed to be used as Sunday School Attendance Software, but as features have been added over the years it certainly has become flexible and useful enough to be used as such. With almost 50 churches currently using it in the role it clearly has something to offer with a customizable interface, flexible tracking options, and powerful reporting. All of this at a remarkably inexpensive price.
