Introduction

BEMA Service’s Barcode Attendance plugin allows you to quickly print group attendance rosters with barcodes and scan them into Rock to quickly take attendance.

This plugin creates two pages in Rock: Barcode Rosters and Barcode Scanner. Before your event, use the Barcode Rosters page to find and filter groups; print the needed rosters with barcodes. After attendance is marked on the rosters, open the Barcode Scanner page and scan each barcode of those people that attended. It’s that easy!

SETUP

After you have installed the BEMA Barcode Attendance plugin, you should now have a new page called ‘Barcode Attendance’ under People > Manage.

The Barcode Attendance page has two links: one to the Barcode Rosters page and a second to the Barcode Scanner page.

Printing Barcode Rosters

Click on the Barcode Rosters link to open the page.

At the top, 4 filters allow you to narrow down which groups will print. These filters can be turned off in the block settings. If you wish to combine groups into a single roster, that option is available on the top right under ‘Combine Classes’.

If you do not see any groups, you will want to go set group types in the block settings. Selecting multiple group types will show a group type dropdown in the interface, for users to select which ones to use.

Select the groups you wish to generate (print) attendance rosters for and click the ‘Generate Groups’ button on the right side of the page.

A new tab will open showing a print dialog, allowing you to print to paper or PDF as needed.

Repeat this process until all group rosters are printed.

NOTE: The roster is created by a Lava file on this page; this can modified to meet your needs for roster design by opening this HTML block Edit HTML settings.

Load Barcode Scanner

After the attendance rosters are filled out, attach a barcode scanner to your computer. Open the Barcode Scanner page and fill out the campus, parent group, date, schedule and location filters (as needed).

By default, the barcodes are printed in Code39 and expect a carriage return. Most barcode scanners are set up to read this common barcode type and already submit a return after a successful scan.

Hit ‘Load Members’ when ready to take attendance.

Scan Attendance Roster

Using the rosters and a scanner, scan each person to mark them as attended. Group members previously marked attended that day will show as ‘Attended’ in the Attended column. Newly scanned-in group members will show ‘-MARKED-‘; these can be manually canceled by using the red X beside them.

If you do not have a barcode scanner handy, type in the ID found on the roster below the barcode and hit ENTER on the keyboard (or press the checkmark button).

Once the roster has been scanned and you are ready to submit attendance, click the ‘Commit Attendance’. A dialog box will appear to let you know that the attendance was saved to the database successfully.

NOTE: Attendance records are saved with a note that says it was scanned by the barcode scanner by the current user with a timestamp.