Church Admin Plugin

Absentee Report

⭐ Premium

The Absentee Report shows who has not attended a selected service across the most recent one, two, three, eight, and twenty-six services — giving you a layered picture of absence from a single missed Sunday through to six months away. It can be viewed on screen or emailed directly to a pastoral team.

Go to Church Admin → Attendance → Absentee report.

Before you start

The absentee report is built from individual attendance records — not aggregate headcounts. You need to have been using Add individual attendance to tick off specific people before this report will contain any data. If the report shows no data, see Add individual attendance.

Step 1 — Choose service and member types

Select which service to report on and which member types to include, then click Choose. You can filter by member type to focus the report — for example reporting only on Members rather than everyone on the Mailing List, which avoids flagging people who were never regular attenders.

Reading the report

The report automatically generates several sections, each covering a different absence window:

  • Absentees for the most recent service — everyone who missed last Sunday. A large list here is normal and not a cause for concern on its own — people miss church for all sorts of reasons.
  • Absentees for the last 2 services — everyone who missed both of the two most recent services
  • Absentees for the last 3 services — missed three in a row — worth a friendly check-in
  • Absentees for the last 8 services — absent for roughly two months; a pastoral visit or call is appropriate
  • Absentees for the last 26 services — absent for approximately six months; someone may have left the church, be going through a difficult time, or need significant pastoral care

Each section only appears if enough attendance records exist — the 26-service section won’t appear until at least 26 individual attendance records have been saved for that service. Each person in the list has a graph icon next to their name that you can click to view their individual attendance history as a chart.

Emailing the report

A Send to… field appears above the report. Enter one or more email addresses separated by commas and click Send. The full report is emailed with appropriate styling for email clients. The recipient list is remembered for next time so you don’t have to retype it.

This makes it easy to share the report with a pastoral team or elder team at the start of each week without them needing access to the admin dashboard.

Using the report pastorally

The different absence windows are designed to prompt different levels of pastoral response:

  • 1–2 services — no action needed in most cases; note it and watch
  • 3 services — a brief message or text to check in
  • 8 services — a phone call or pastoral visit
  • 26 services — a significant pastoral conversation or review of their membership status

You can use the Follow Up Funnels module to assign pastoral tasks to team members directly from the report. See Follow up funnels.

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