Have you ever wondered why attendance marking is crucial to the school’s day-to-day routine? It’s not difficult to understand. If a student is marked “present” this student is also implicitly tagged “safe”, “sincere”, “punctual”, “conscientious” and “regular”. But, it is important to keep up with the times! Everyday roll-calls are an unrepeatable and tedious task that takes up a lot of teacher’s time…. time which could be better spent with students or figuring out activities in the early morning that increase brain power. Nowadays, many schools have adopted attendance systems that incorporate biometric software to simplify the process of records.
Before we go into why Biometrics is growing in importance for attendance management, it is essential to know what the biometric attendance management system is about.
What is a Biometric Attendance System?
Biometrics is a sophisticated technology that utilizes fingerprint or thumb impression features to confirm your identity as a person. This is because the fingerprint or thumb impression of a person is unique and does not match with the fingerprints of any other person, thus making the biometric system trustworthy and secure.
Therefore, biometric readers within an attendance system that uses Biometrics can identify an individual student or staff member and keep track of his departure and arrival at the school by analysing and verifying the thumb, fingerprint, or other biochemical (physiological) features.
Benefits of Biometric Systems for Attendance Management
Let’s now look at why Biometric attendance systems benefit the student management system.
1. Easy-To-Use:
Biometrics, despite its technical-sounding name, is quite simple to utilize. It requires only an image of your thumbprint or fingerprint for the biometric reader in the attendance management system to recognize the employee or student and record the time of their arrival or departure. Other systems scan an Identity card of a person attending Biometrics using the palm vein scanner, an iris scanner, and facial recognition capability.
2. Precise:
The benefit of this kind of attendance management system for schools is its accuracy. There is no chance of fraud or altering the fingerprint data or any other information about physical characteristics recorded in the program. Each student is therefore identified and provided with exact information about check-in/checkout times, the number of classes/activities that students have attended, etc.
3. Prevents Proxy Attendance:
Proximate attendance issues have plagued institutions for years. Students can ask their peers to verify their attendance under their names through manual attendance systems. Staff members have also been frequently caught using the old system to get their clocking-in times altered. But the biometrics-based system is entirely fool proof and secure against fraud. Examination centres are also equipped with Biometrics to stop cheating. This was a common practice when students could obtain a proxy to complete their assignments.
4. Payroll is simplified:
Payroll processing is a huge and time-consuming task. The School attendance system will sort it out, too, as payroll processing software is integrated into the biometric attendance software for taking note of leave taken by faculty and administrators, as well as the late check-ins, half-days and overtime hours and extra days. This means that deductions and additional payments can be added to the payroll precisely and in real-time. Using Biometrics, it’s simple to determine what the teacher is doing at any given moment. Monitoring and tracking staff members are easy, and the calculations are easy.
5. SAVES TIME:
A biometrics-enabled attendance program is an amazing time-saving tool. Teachers who are overloaded with marking attendance every day can breathe a sigh of relief. Attendance records can be easy to maintain without having to keep hefty registers or spreadsheets. Additionally, attendance software incorporating Biometrics uses Business Intelligence-powered dashboards that create consolidated reports and category-wise ones with the click of one button. Data analysis becomes fast and precise and includes daily, monthly, annual, and trend pieces that are categorical and shown within the display in either pictorial or graphic formats. Consider the time and effort saved to receive complete and precise data on trends in attendance!
6. Financially viable:
Biometrics attendance system also has a great ROI. Manual attendance is costly for the school or the college, not just for time but for the workforce and stationery. Registers for attendance storage, secure file organisers, and everything else costs money. In the end, biometric readers need minimal maintenance.
Therefore, initial costs for installation might appear higher than having your teacher keep track of attendance. Still, the savings are on security personnel to guard the entrances and on administrative staff to manage the attendance records and provide reports on trends in attendance. The time you can be used for more productive tasks like improving learning outcomes or focusing on teaching strategies is also a great “business” sense since it can significantly boost your reputation of the institution.
