Marking Attendance for a Lesson
Attendance is marked per participant, per lesson. You pick an attendance status from your configured list, and the system records the outcome — and handles any billing or makeup credit side effects automatically. For gro
Where to Mark Attendance
You can mark attendance from several places in the app. All use the same underlying system — the choice of surface comes down to whichever fits your workflow:
- Lessons list — inline attendance dropdown next to each lesson. Quick to use when reviewing a day's lessons.
- Calendar — open the lesson event and mark attendance from the detail panel.
- Student detail page — view a student's lesson history and mark or update attendance from there.
- Dashboard — today's lessons are listed with attendance controls available.
How to Mark Attendance
Select the attendance status that reflects what happened. Your available statuses are configured in your attendance settings — see Attendance Statuses and What They Mean for what each one does.
Once you select a status, the system records it immediately and handles any downstream effects:
- Billing effects — if the status is billable and the student is on lesson-pack or PAYG billing, the relevant billing action runs automatically. Under calendar-based or monthly/term billing, attendance does not directly affect invoicing.
- Makeup credits — if the status is configured to create a makeup credit, one is created immediately.
See How Attendance Affects Billing and Makeup Credits for detail on these side effects.
Group Lessons: Per-Participant Attendance
For group lessons, attendance is marked individually for each group member. Every participant in the lesson can receive a different outcome — for example, one student attended, another was absent with notice, and a third was absent without notice.
Billing and makeup credit effects apply per participant. If one member has a non-billable status, their lesson-pack credit is not consumed; another member with a billable status will have theirs consumed. The group lesson is one event, but attendance recording and its consequences are fully participant-level.
Attendance Is Participant-Level, Not Lesson-Level
Attendance in Octavia is always recorded against a specific lesson participant — not simply against the lesson as a whole. For individual lessons this distinction is invisible (there's only one participant), but it matters for group lessons, for billing linkage, and for how makeup entitlement is tracked. The system correctly handles all of this behind the scenes.
Unmarked Attendance
If you haven't marked attendance for a lesson, it simply shows as unmarked. Unmarked lessons have no billing effect for any billing model — including PAYG, which only generates a charge when attendance is explicitly marked as billable. There is no penalty for leaving attendance unmarked temporarily.