❓FAQ

No problem — SEAtS works with whatever data you have. Start with attendance and add sources (submissions, library, VLE) over time. A staged approach is fully supported.

The lecturer can manually mark attendance using the SEAtS Attendance App during or shortly after the class — ideally before Monday morning when alerts are generated.

Up to 2 minutes for a swipe to be processed and appear in the attendance dashboard.

Swipes at an unscheduled room won't match the event. Manually mark attendance in the app and notify timetabling to update the room assignment. Students who swiped at the original room will still show as attended.

Contact SEAtS support immediately via the portal or email. The process covers Detection → Classification → Response → Communication → Resolution → Closure, with regular updates throughout.

Yes — SEAtS includes a student-facing view showing attendance and engagement data. This is configurable per product and can be enabled or restricted by your administrator.

This usually means the swipe occurred at a device not associated with the timetabled room, or the timetable entry was updated after the swipe was processed. Check the device-to-room mapping in Admin and, if needed, raise a swipe reprocessing request with your SEAtS project manager.

There can be a short delay before cancelled sessions are removed from downloaded reports, depending on when your timetable feed next syncs. If cancelled sessions persist beyond 24 hours, contact support and reference the session IDs so they can be removed from the data feed.

The student profile calculates attendance using a different date range or calculation method than the Overall Attendance Report. The profile shows the rolling academic year, while the report may apply custom date filters or exclude specific lesson types. Contact support to confirm which calculation each view uses for your configuration.

By default, "Act as Blackout" absences exclude those sessions from the workflow calculation but the % Attendance figure in the app may still include them in its denominator. If you need the app's attendance percentage to also exclude blackout sessions, raise this as a configuration request with your project manager.

Yes — contact groups can be updated via a bulk file upload through SFTP, meaning you don't need to add contacts individually. Ask your project manager for the correct file format and column mapping for your instance.

Yes — the "Current User" filter relies on staff records being present in SEAtS and linked to the logged-in user's account. If you have not yet imported a staff file, the filter will return no results. Import your staff data file via SFTP and the filter will resolve automatically on the next data sync.

Card readers sync their time from the SEAtS server, but some models require a manual reboot or network reconnect after a clock change to pull the updated time. We recommend checking your readers on the morning after a clock change — if any show the wrong time, a restart will usually resolve it. Contact support if readers continue to show an incorrect time.

Absence request approval and rejection emails can be configured to automatically copy or notify a student's personal supervisor. This is set up in Admin → Absence Types → Communication Settings. If the supervisor is not receiving notifications, check that the student-to-supervisor assignment is in place and that the supervisor's email is on the staff record.

SEAtS creates one register per scheduled event ID. If your timetabling system generates a single event ID for a multi-day session, SEAtS will treat it as one event and produce one register. If each day has a separate event ID, each will generate its own register. Check with your timetabling team how multi-day sessions are exported from your SIS.

Open the student's attendance record in the SEAtS portal or app, locate the relevant session, and manually override the attendance status. If the session has already triggered a workflow alert, you can also reverse the workflow stage from the student's case record. Manual corrections should be made before Monday morning when weekly alerts are generated.

SEAtS supports IMS Caliper and direct Moodle integrations for online engagement events, and can ingest data from Blackboard and other VLEs via a structured Generic Events file sent over SFTP. Contact your project manager for the file specification and field mapping for your chosen VLE.