Help/Groups

Recording what happened at a meeting

Group attendance, leader reflections from churchHQ, and what Scout does with them.

A group meeting can be recorded from two places: staff take attendance on the group page, and the group's leader logs a reflection from the member app. Both write to the same meeting record, and that record is the only per-person attendance Scout keeps anywhere.

Take attendance from the dashboard

Open the group
Groups in the sidebar, then click the group. The Take Attendance button sits in the header next to Add Member.
Set the date
Meeting Date defaults to today. Change it if you are recording a meeting from earlier in the week.
Uncheck who was missing
Under Who was there? every current member starts checked. Uncheck the people who were not there.
Click Save Attendance
The modal closes and the meeting appears at the top of the Meetings section.

This writes one row per person per meeting: their name, and present or absent. Nothing else. There is no notes field in the modal, so anything you want to remember about the meeting itself has nowhere to go on the record.

Two more things worth knowing before you rely on this:

There is no attendance editing screen. To correct a saved record, expand the meeting, click Delete meeting (there is no confirmation dialog), and take attendance again.
Recording and reading both require the Create & edit groups permission. Someone with only View groups still sees the Take Attendance button, but saving does nothing and their Meetings section is empty. See What each permission controls.

The leader's reflection in the member app

Group leaders record the same meeting from churchHQ, at /m/groups/[id]/feedback. Anyone who is not currently a leader or co-leader of that group gets Can't log feedback with the line Only this group's leaders can log feedback. No staff permission overrides that.

Leaders reach the form from the churchHQ home banner (How did {group name} go? / Share a quick reflection →) or from the group page button How did your meeting go?. Both appear only while Scout is asking, which is within 72 hours of a scheduled meeting for an active, published group that has a Meeting day set. Outside that window a leader has no visible way in.

The form has four parts:

Who was here lists the approved roster with a counter reading {n} of {n}. Everyone starts marked present. Tapping a name toggles it to absent, which greys the name and strikes it through. A leader who taps straight through to save records a full house.
How was the meeting? is four buttons: Difficult, Fine, Good, Great. One of them is required. Until a rating is picked, the button below reads Save reflection with the hint Pick a rating to save.
An optional note about the meeting, placeholder Anything worth noting about the group? (optional).
Anything worth passing along about someone? with Add a note about someone. Each note is a member picked from Choose a member…, free text (What happened? (e.g. mentioned interest in baptism)), and a Mark as a prayer request checkbox.

The leader does not choose the date. Scout attaches the reflection to the most recent scheduled meeting, or to today if there isn't one. If staff already took attendance for that date, the reflection lands on the same meeting and its present/absent marks overwrite what was saved. That makes the member app the one place a recorded meeting can be corrected without deleting it.

Who sees what a leader writes

The rating and the group note go to staff only, in the Leader feedback section on the group page and inside the expanded meeting row. Reading them needs Create & edit groups. Members never see them, and the leader's name is shown next to every entry.

A per-person note becomes a real pastoral note on that person's profile, authored by the leader, readable by anyone with View pastoral notes. It also lands on the staff dashboard list for 14 days, quoting the leader's words, so what a leader writes always reaches staff attention instead of waiting on someone to open the right profile. The person it is about does not see it in the app, and Scout sends them nothing. Leaders can only write about people on that group's approved roster.

Ticking Mark as a prayer request tags the note Prayer on the profile and routes it to the same dashboard list as every other prayer request, for the same people who can read notes.

Reading it back

The Meetings section on the group page is dated newest first. Each row carries a chip reading {present} of {total}, where the total is how many people were on the roster when the record was saved, not the roster today. Expand a row and present members show a solid square, absentees a hollow square and a struck-through name. Any leader reflections for that meeting sit underneath.

That list shows the 8 most recent meetings, and the Leader feedback section shows the 8 most recent reflections. There is no pagination and no view-all.

What the reporting surface actually is

The group page is where per-meeting detail lives. There is no per-group trend chart, no attendance history beyond those 8 rows, and no export of who was present.

Reports does carry a Groups section for the quarter you are viewing: Active Groups, Participants, Avg Group Size, New Members, and a Group Meeting Attendance block reading something like 62% average attendance rate across 41 meetings. That figure is church-wide across every group meeting in the quarter, with no per-group breakdown. Export PDF at the top of Reports prints the whole report, including that block.

Group-meeting attendance is the only per-person attendance record in Scout. It is not service attendance. Scout has no model for who was in the room on a Sunday: weekend numbers are anonymous headcounts, and check-in covers kids and events. Do not read a group attendance rate as a participation rate for the church.

How this feeds Scout's read on a person

Groups is one of five domains behind a person's status, weighted 25 and normalized across the domains that person actually has signal in. Inside the groups domain, meeting attendance over the last 90 days is the largest slice at 45%, followed by how many groups they belong to (25%), whether they lead one (15%), and the sentiment of reflections they submitted as a leader (15%).

Scores are recomputed nightly, so a meeting you record this afternoon changes nothing on screen until tomorrow.

Two limits worth holding onto:

The membership count behind that score does not filter on anything. A pending join request, and a membership in a draft or archived group, both count.
A group whose meetings are never recorded produces no attendance signal at all. Scout reads that as nothing to say, not as absence, so a faithful group with no records will not raise a flag and will not lift anyone's score either.

Status is a read on observable participation, not a judgment. What Scout's statuses mean covers how the domains combine, and Reading a person's profile shows where group history appears on the person.

Creating a group covers Meeting day, which decides whether a leader is ever prompted.
Members, leaders, and join requests covers giving someone the Leader or Co-Leader role, which is the whole setup for the reflection form.
What members see of your groups covers what the roster looks like from the congregation's side.

Still need help?

Email support@scout.church and we'll get back within one business day.