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Attendance Simplified: New Orah Improvements Built From Your FeedbackWebinar Recording
Grant: Welcome, everyone. I'm Grant, Head of Customer Success at Orah. On behalf of the whole team, welcome to the Attendance Simplified webinar. Before we get started, I have to say we have a very large group of schools joining us today. The whole Orah team saw that number, and we're thrilled you're here -- mostly because it tells us you care about this as much as we do.
Today is for you. You've been patient, you've shared your feedback, you've pushed for improvements, and this session is us showing you that we've heard every bit of it. What you're about to see is real work, ready for your school year.
Here's what we're covering today:
We'll finish with Q&A and a quick look at what's next at Orah.
Let me introduce the team. Many of you already know Emily. She's one of our Customer Success Managers and manages a portfolio of Orah schools. Emily, say a quick hello.
Emily: Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to see so many familiar names on the call. I know you're going to be as excited as I am about some of these updates. Thank you.
Grant: Also joining us is Alexis, another Customer Success Manager. Emily and Alexis have genuinely been your biggest advocates at Orah. They're the ones who brought your feedback into every internal conversation about these improvements. Alexis?
Alexis: Hi, everyone. So nice to see all of you. I'm excited for you to see what we have today. Thank you.
Grant: Zohab will be joining us shortly. He's recently moved into an onboarding role, so if you're new to Orah, there's a good chance he walked you through your setup. He'll be managing Q&A alongside Alexis.
Also with us is Madeline, our Senior UX Designer. She's the person who sat with attendance managers, watched how you actually work in the system, did the real research, and designed what you're about to see. Her work is the centerpiece of today. Madeline?
Madeline: Hey, everyone. I'm looking forward to hopefully meeting some of you in the coming months to gather your feedback and keep making impactful improvements. I'm excited to run through the designs today.
Grant: And of course, Kurt, Head of Product. Kurt will cover the structural and foundational improvements that make everything you're going to see today reliable under the hood. Kurt?
Kurt: Thanks, everyone. Looking forward to sharing what we've been working on. Thank you.
Grant: Alexis and Zohab will watch the chat throughout -- feel free to drop questions there as we go. We'll also have a dedicated Q&A period at the end. Emily, let's get started.
Emily: Before we dive into the designs, I want to provide some context for where they came from. A lot of these improvements have been a long time coming.
I want to say this genuinely: I see you, and we all see you. We've probably spent hundreds of hours on calls with attendance managers and registrars, and what strikes me every time is just how much is on your plate. It's not just attendance -- it's interruptions, parent calls, teacher questions, things that need to happen right now in the middle of everything else you're managing.
When I've watched people move through Orah to get things done, there are just so many different ways to do it. Multiple paths, multiple pages, and you have to make decisions in real time about which route is fastest. That has really been nagging at me, and as a team we kept coming back to the same thought: there has to be a better way.
What attendance managers actually need is one screen -- not a better version of the existing screens, not the four screens you look at. One centralized view that brings all the information together, lets you take action from the same place, without navigating away.
Madeline: Exactly. Having multiple tabs open means you have to hold two things in your mind at once. You check the class record, go to the student profile, and by the time you go to make the change, you've already lost track of what you needed to update. The goal is one place where you can see exactly what you need and take action without losing yourself along the way.
Emily: And what makes that possible is the foundational work underneath -- how daily attendance is recorded, how it maps back to your SIS, and how schools with multiple divisions can configure policies separately. Kurt will get to that. But everything you're about to see is built on top of that framework.
Everything we've described -- the workflow observations, the feedback we've been collecting -- was confirmed and brought to life by Madeline, who put real research behind it. I'm excited for her to share that research and walk you through the designs. Madeline?
Madeline: Thank you. I want to quickly touch on the research background to show you where these designs came from.
We conducted extensive research to understand the precise needs of attendance managers and ensure that the improvements we're making are evidence-based. That included:
This helped us paint a picture of the key daily workflows for attendance managers and identify the highest-friction areas to prioritize.
Key findings:
The overarching theme: the data is often there -- it's just difficult to find.
The focus: Solving the "emotional now." Morning reconciliation is where the most friction exists, and we wanted to make that experience as seamless as possible. The designs you're about to see are built around a high-intensity, real-time dashboard optimized for speed and clarity -- reducing the clicks required to find a student's current expected location versus their last confirmed location, lowering cognitive load during those high-stress moments like a parent calling to find out where their child is.
I'll share my screen and take you through the prototypes now. Some of this is placeholder information and won't cover the full functionality, but it's meant to communicate where we're heading.
Daily Reconciliation View
You'll see we're on the Attendance tab, looking at the new Daily Reconciliation View. The other views haven't been touched -- you can still access group records, student records, and everything you're used to. This view gives you a filtered, focused snapshot of what needs your attention throughout the day.
The default is always today. There are four tabs across the top:
At the start of the day, Absent, Late, and Overdue sit at zero. Passes shows all active and scheduled passes, plus passes that have ended during the day. As the day progresses, the numbers tick up.
Absent for the Day
You can differentiate between excused and unexcused absences, apply student filters, and search by name. For each student, you can see their division, grade, and daily status. Expanding the schedule shows their full class schedule -- and if they have any passes or events, those appear alongside it.
From this view, you can also see a student's contacts without navigating to the student profile -- the contact name, phone number, and email are all there. You can send an email directly or grab the phone number to call. You can also toggle on a contacts view to uncollapse all contacts across multiple students at once.
Editing the daily attendance status will also be possible from here -- selecting a new status and saving in as few clicks as possible.
Bulk actions are supported as well: select all students to edit their daily attendance status or add a pass in bulk. You can also select by class and apply a new roll code and reason. Bulk actions work at any scale -- all students, a filtered subset, or just one or two.
Late for the Day
Similar functionality -- toggle between excused and unexcused, apply filters, and see each student's schedule in context. For example, you can see if a student had a late arrival pass that crossed over with their absences, explaining the excused status. You can open or edit the pass modal directly from here.
Overdue Rolls
Overdue rolls are consolidated by teacher. You can see each teacher's schedule in context -- which rolls are in progress and which haven't been started. From here you can open and complete rolls, or send reminders. At the end of the day, you can select all teachers with overdue rolls and send a single consolidated reminder -- each teacher receives one summary of all their overdue rolls from the day, rather than individual alerts for each one.
Passes
All scheduled, active, and ended passes for the day. You can filter by student or pass type, see each pass in the context of the student's schedule, and take bulk actions -- add a pass, delete passes, or change the pass type. Bulk actions can also be scoped to a specific pass type.
Student Schedule in the Student Profile
The student schedule is now accessible directly from the student profile. The default is today's view -- you can see the student's class schedule, passes, and events all in one place. Pass modals can be opened or edited from here, and you can take bulk actions such as selecting multiple classes and changing attendance.
Daily Attendance Policies
Daily Attendance Status
This determines what daily attendance status a student receives based on their class attendance or arrival time. You can apply one policy school-wide, or configure it per division or year level.
For example:
You can save different settings for different year levels, and see a clear summary of what policy applies to each.
Daily Attendance Count
This controls how a student's daily attendance is counted -- the score that might appear on a report card or feed into reports. Again, configurable school-wide, per division, or per year level.
Count method options:
Attendance in the Parent App
A new alert icon in the top right of the app shows attendance alerts. Parents receive these alerts via email and can now also view them in the app. From the alert, they can read it, call the school, dismiss it, or view the related attendance records.
Parents can also navigate directly to their child's attendance from the Family tab -- useful when there are no active alerts but they want to review attendance.
From the attendance page, they can see:
Kurt: Thanks, Maddie. I'll walk you through a few fundamental improvements to the data structure on the back end.
The three core entities that make up a school in our upcoming data model are divisions, school years, and houses, with students enrolled into each through sections.
In practice: within a school you might have Lower, Middle, and Upper School as divisions, plus dorms or houses for boarding. We think of divisions and houses as operational units -- they often have their own students, schedules, pass types, attendance policies, and so on. That's the concept behind what Maddie showed with division-level configuration.
What this enables: At the moment, attendance records are organized around scheduled meetings -- we know a meeting occurred at a certain time and place and belongs to a course, but we don't know what term, academic year, school day, or period it belongs to. By bringing in the full school schedule, we'll be able to structure records in a proper hierarchy: school year, term, school day, period.
This means much more structured reporting and filtering -- breaking down a student's attendance by academic year and term, seeing how many school days were in a given period, and presenting metrics in a way that aligns with how you'd expect to see them in your SIS or LMS.
SIS Integration: We're primarily working with Blackbaud and Veracross. We're emulating their data model and mapping it to ours, pulling section enrollments, scheduled meetings, divisions, and related data.
The rollout plan: implement the back-end structure first, then sync data from the SIS. Once that's stable, we'll begin embedding it across the application -- starting with the attendance dashboard and better filtering capabilities.
Grant: Thank you, Madeline and Kurt. Madeline, the research, the design, the care that went into every screen -- that doesn't happen without someone who genuinely listens and cares about getting it right. Kurt, the foundational work you walked through doesn't always get the spotlight, but it's what makes everything else reliable. We appreciate you both.
To everyone on this call -- we hope you enjoy these updates as much as we do. We've been looking forward to this for a while.
A couple of housekeeping notes: this session has been recorded. We'll share it along with the slide deck with all attendees within the next 24 hours, and it will also be posted on our webinars page.
Q&A
Zohab: A few questions we can address quickly:
Will the slide deck and recording be shared? Yes -- a condensed version of the deck plus the full recording will go out to all attendees.
Will filters persist between tabs and visits? Madeline?
Madeline: Yes. Filters will be persistent, behaving similarly to how they work in the passes tab today. If there's a group of students you're constantly reviewing, your filter will stay in place when you return.
Zohab: How does attendance data integrate with the SIS, specifically Blackbaud? All attendance records and passes write back to your SIS -- Blackbaud, Veracross, FACTS, or others -- based on the mappings you've defined in your attendance settings in Orah.
When will these updates be available? These updates are targeting the start of the next school year -- August.
How is attendance rate calculated? Attendance rate is the percentage of days a student was present or late out of all expected days. Absences count against the rate; lates can be included or excluded depending on your school's configuration in Orah.
Will parents be able to edit passes in the app after approval? Madeline?
Madeline: Getting more detail into the alert emails is coming quite soon -- it will show student details, the alert criteria, and related records directly in the email rather than requiring a click-through to Orah. As for parents editing passes after approval, that's still something we're looking at.
Zohab: How far in advance can parents see a student's schedule?
Madeline: That will reflect how far the student's schedule has been set in Orah.
Zohab: Will seeing attendance stats in the parent app require setting up the daily count? No -- it pulls from data that already exists. You wouldn't need to configure the count to access that data in the app.
Will there be attendance manager capabilities on the mobile/staff app? Not in this initial release -- our research indicated attendance managers are predominantly on desktop, and we wanted to ensure availability before the school year starts. It's something we'll look at rolling out to mobile based on demand.
Grant: What does training look like? Reach out to your CSM -- Emily or Alexis -- to arrange training for your attendance managers. If there's enough interest, we may host a dedicated training webinar as well.
Madeline: Can parents see a custom date range for attendance? Yes -- once school scheduling is rolled out and defines the academic year, parents can select "this school year." In the meantime, a custom date range picker is available.
Grant: Great questions and suggestions, everyone. Before we wrap, here's a quick look at what's coming:
Thank you all so much for being here. Until next week -- have a good one, everyone.
