Attendance tracking by location

What attendance tracking does

Attendance tracking answers one question: which people were present at which of your offices, on which days — and how that changes over weeks, months and years.

It reuses signals VerOps Scout already reports. When a device's network matches one of your trusted office networks, Scout classifies that device as being at that location. Attendance turns those classifications into a daily record per person, then rolls that record up so you can chart long-term trends without keeping years of raw detail.

Turning it on

Attendance is off for every location until you switch it on. Nothing is recorded for a location that is not tracked — the opt-in is enforced when data is written, not by hiding it afterwards.

1. Go to Inventory → Policy.
2. Find the office network for the site you want to track under Office networks. If the site does not exist yet, add it first — the network's SSIDs, BSSIDs, CIDRs or gateway MACs are what identify the location.
3. Switch Attendance on for that location.

Repeat for each site you want to track. Leave the rest off.

Turning a location off stops new records immediately. It does not delete what was already collected — history stays until it ages out on the normal schedule below. If you need existing records removed, that is a deliberate data-deletion request, not a side effect of a toggle.

Who can see it

Attendance has its own permissions, deliberately separate from inventory. Someone who manages software licences does not automatically gain the ability to see where a named colleague was last Tuesday.

Permission	Grants
attendance.view	Read attendance figures and attendance dashboard widgets.
attendance.manage	Choose which locations are tracked.

Neither is included in the default Member or Viewer roles. Both must be granted explicitly, under Settings → Access control. Holding inventory.view is not sufficient — including for dashboard widgets, which are checked separately.

What is recorded

One record per person, location and day: that the person was present, when they were first seen and when they were last seen that day.

Two design choices are worth knowing, because they determine what the numbers mean.

Choice	Why
Per person, not per device	Presence is attributed to the current user of the device, so somebody carrying a laptop and a tablet counts once. A device with no identifiable user is skipped rather than counted anonymously — a headcount that is quietly too high is worse than one with a known gap.
Present or absent, not hours on site	A day is recorded as attended or not. This answers attendance rates, streaks, day-of-week patterns and office utilisation, while stopping well short of a record of an individual's working hours — a materially more sensitive artefact that VerOps deliberately does not build.

Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly

Detail is kept for a while; summaries are kept for good. Each level is recomputed from the level below, so a missed cycle repairs itself on the next run.

Level	Holds	Retained
Daily	Each person's attended days, with first and last seen	~13 months
Weekly	Days attended per person, per week	~3 years
Monthly	Days attended per person, per month	Kept indefinitely
Yearly	Days attended per person, per year	Kept indefinitely

This is why long-range comparisons stay available: a year-over-year chart reads the yearly summary, not years of daily rows. It also means the fine-grained record of an individual's movements does not live forever, while the trend you actually report on does.

Presence is sampled hourly, and the summaries are rebuilt nightly. A day appears in the weekly and higher levels the night after it ends.

Putting it on a dashboard

Two widget types are available when you add a widget with the Inventory data source:

Widget	Shows
Attendance trend	People present per period across all tracked locations — the "are we coming in more or less" line.
Attendance by location	People present per location — which offices are actually being used.

Both take a grain of day, week, month or year. The grain selects which summary level is read, so asking a yearly question stays fast no matter how much history you have.

Viewers without attendance.view see an error on these widgets rather than the data — a dashboard cannot be used to share attendance with people who are not permitted to see it.

If no attendance is recorded

Attendance depends on presence classification working first. Check these in order.

Check	Where
Is the location switched on?	Inventory → Policy → Office networks. The Attendance switch must be on for that site.
Are devices being classified as office?	Inventory → Devices. If everything shows remote or unknown, the office network's match signals are not matching. This is the most common cause.
Do the match signals describe the office?	Edit the office network. A site defined only by a VPN range, or a network named for home working, will never classify a device as being in an office.
Is the network module enabled for those devices?	Inventory → Policy → Collection. Presence needs the network module; without it Scout reports no network to match against.
Do the devices have a known user?	Inventory → Devices. A device with no current user is skipped by design, so a fleet of shared or kiosk machines will record no attendance.

Attendance begins accumulating from the moment a location is switched on. It is not backfilled from earlier presence data, so expect the first full day of figures the day after you enable a site.