Attendance fields and limits

Every rule on this page is applied by PTRS at the moment you save. Nothing is checked on the screen before that, so the message you see is the one quoted here.

All of attendance is open to the same people: staff members, site directors, organisation administrators and super admins. There is no separate read-only access.

Opening the day

Launching the kiosk opens today's session for your site. If one is already open for today, the kiosk uses it, so launching the kiosk twice is safe.

PTRS needs	Required	Notes
The site	Yes	Taken from the kiosk.
The staff member opening it	No	Normally your own staff record, found from your signed-in account.

If your account is not linked to a staff record, PTRS looks for any active staff member at the site, and failing that any staff member in the organisation, and records the session as opened by them. That person may not be on site and did not open it. Check the Opened by line before relying on it.

You cannot set the date, which is always today in universal time, or the opening time.

Checking a child in

PTRS needs	Required	What PTRS accepts
The session	Yes	Must exist and must not be closed. The kiosk fills this in; Quick Check-In asks you to pick it.
The child	Yes	Must be a member record in your organisation.
The method	Yes	Badge scan or manual. It is a label on the record and changes nothing else.
The room	No	No screen offers one. If a room is named, PTRS works out the room's occupancy.
Illness override	No	No screen offers one. If used, the override is written to the audit trail by name.
Paperwork override	No	No screen offers one. It only changes whether an audit entry is written; missing paperwork never blocks a check-in.

PTRS refuses the check-in, in this order, when the session does not exist or is closed; when the child does not exist; when the child already has an open check-in in this session; when the child is inside a 24-hour illness return window and no override was used; and when PTRS cannot find a staff record for you and the session has no opener to fall back on.

You cannot set the check-in time, which is the moment PTRS received it, or the recording staff member.

PTRS answers a check-in with the child's name, the time, the method, the room if any, whether the child has allergies and what they are, the room's ratio if a room was named, and any missing paperwork. The kiosk shows the allergies straight away and asks separately for the paperwork a moment later.

Checking a child out

PTRS needs	Required	What PTRS accepts
The session	Yes	Must exist. Unlike check-in, a closed session is not refused.
The child	Yes	Must have an open check-in in this session.
The guardian	Yes	Must be on the child's authorised pickup list. There is no override.

A check-out adds a leaving time to the child's check-in. It does not create a check-out entry of its own, which is why no feed or history ever shows one.

Closing a session

No screen can do this. If it were done, closing sets a closing time and nothing else. It does not check anyone out and does not produce a daily summary.

Queued check-ins from an offline kiosk

The kiosk sends its queue as a batch. PTRS checks the batch as a whole first, and if any one record fails one of these rules, the whole batch is refused.

Each record needs	What PTRS accepts
At least one record in the batch	An empty batch is refused with "At least one check-in record is required."
The child	Must be filled in.
The session	Must be filled in.
The staff member	Must be filled in. A made-up provisional session leaves this blank, which is why such batches fail.
The method	Must be filled in.
The check-in time	Must be filled in and no more than one minute in the future. "Check-in time cannot be more than 1 minute in the future (clock skew tolerance)."
The room	Optional, and never used. Queued check-ins never carry a room into PTRS.

Records that pass are then checked one at a time, and each can fail on its own without stopping the others:

PTRS rejects a record when	Why
Session (id) not found.	No such session in PTRS.
Member (id) not found.	No such child.
Staff (id) not found.	No such staff member.
Duplicate check-in for member (id).	The child already had an open check-in within one minute of the queued time.
Invalid attendance method.	Neither a badge scan nor manual.

PTRS then reports how many records it received, how many went in and how many failed, with the reason for each failure.

Checks that a normal check-in does and a queued one does not: the "already checked in" rule beyond the one-minute window, the 24-hour illness block, the missing-paperwork warning, room occupancy, and the allergy alert.

The kiosk's own limits: batches of 50, up to 5 retries per record, and queued records kept on the device for 72 hours.

What each attendance figure is worked out from

Figure or screen	What it reads	Does it work?
Today's arrivals feed	Today's check-ins, newest first, up to 100	Yes. The site filter is accepted and not applied, so the list is organisation-wide.
Open sessions list	Open sessions only, newest first, up to 50	Yes.
The attendance dashboard figures	Headcount, room occupancy, last 20 arrivals, expected, present and absent	Partly. Expected, present and absent are always 0.
Rooms at a site	The newest occupancy note per room	Yes, but empty until a check-in names a room. The newest note is used however old it is.
Children expected today	The expected-attendance list	No. Always empty.
A child's attendance history	A day grid, an attendance rate and a streak, over 30 days unless you choose otherwise	Yes.
The attendance heatmap	Daily summaries and the expected list	No. Always zeros.

The two that do not work read lists that nothing in PTRS fills in.

How the attendance rate is worked out

A child's attendance rate is the number of days with at least one check-in, divided by the number of days in the window, as a percentage to two decimal places. Every calendar day in the window counts, including weekends and days the club was closed.

A child who attends every weekday of a 30-day window therefore scores Worked out between 70% and 77%, because a 30-day window holds 21 to 23 weekdays and 21 divided by 30 is 70.0% while 23 divided by 30 is 76.7%. The figure is not the child's attendance against days the club was open, and should not be presented as one.

The streak counts consecutive days present, working backwards from the end of the window and skipping any absences at the very end. It does not skip weekends.

Value lists

• Method, as you choose it: badge scan or manual.
• Method, as stored: badge, manual, or NFC. NFC is defined and cannot be chosen from any screen.
• Attendance type: check-in or check-out. Only check-ins are ever stored.
• Occupancy status: safe, warning or violation.
• Expected status: pending, arrived or absent. No expected record is ever created, so none is ever used.

Ratio thresholds

Three sets of thresholds apply in three places, and they do not agree. See How ratio compliance is measured for which applies where.

The DELACARE rules PTRS stores

Seven rules, entered when PTRS was installed and changeable only by someone with technical access. Each carries the DELACARE section it comes from.

Rule	Ages	Children per adult	Largest group	Field trip	Summer	Section
Infants, 0 to 12 months	0	4	8			88
Toddlers, 12 to 24 months	1	5	10			88
Toddlers, 24 to 36 months	2	6	12			88
Preschool, 3 to 4	3 to 4	10	20			88
School age, 5 to 8	5 to 8	10	20	8	10	27
School age, 9 to 12	9 to 12	15	30	10	15	27
School age, 13 to 18	13 to 18	15	30	12	15	27

From the regulation These are DELACARE sections 27 and 88 as PTRS holds them. Check them against the current regulation before quoting them outside the club. PTRS stores them as figures and nothing re-checks them against the published rule.

The field-trip and summer figures are stored and never used. Only the standard figure is applied.

The room's own limit

Every room carries a maximum ratio and a capacity. The maximum ratio is used two ways: as the fallback when no DELACARE rule matches, and as the way a DELACARE rule is chosen, by finding the rule whose children-per-adult figure equals the room's number.

So the age group is inferred backwards from the room's number. A room set to 10 is scored as ages 5 to 8; a room set to 15 as ages 9 to 12. No child's age is read. The youngest-child figure that the mixed-age rule would need is left blank on every note.

The fixed thresholds in the compliance score

The compliance score's ratio rule ignores both of the above and applies one set of numbers to every room:

The room's ratio	Outcome	Score change
Children present and no staff	Violation	minus 40
15 to 1 or worse	Violation	minus 40
14 to 1 up to 15 to 1	Warning, "critical threshold"	minus 20
13 to 1 up to 14 to 1	Warning, "approaching limit"	minus 20
Under 13 to 1	Compliant	none

The category score starts at 100 and cannot go below 0. A preschool room limited to 10 to 1 is scored compliant at 12 to 1 by this rule.

The 15-minute ratio note

Setting	Value
How often	Every 15 minutes
Working hours	6 am to 10 pm by PTRS's own clock, which runs on universal time (UTC). Outside those hours nothing is written.
What is written	One note per room, per active site, per run
What each note holds	Children, staff, qualified staff, required ratio, actual ratio, whether compliant, and which rule was applied
Who is told	Anyone with the compliance page open at that moment, when a room with children is over ratio, or would be if one adult left

The working hours are in universal time, not Delaware time. Locally that is about 1 or 2 am to 5 or 6 pm depending on the season.

None of these settings can be changed from any screen.

Related

• How ratio compliance is measured
• Check a child in
• Keep the door moving when the connection drops
• Attendance troubleshooting