Attendance in most small groups is somebody's rough impression. That works until the week you need to know who you have not seen since February.
Taking it
A leader opens the group, goes to the Attendance tab, clicks Record Attendance for the date, and marks each member Present, Excused or Absent. That is the whole input: under a minute at the end of a meeting.
You can define Meeting Types per group if the group meets in more than one way, so a Bible study that also runs a monthly social can keep those separate rather than blending them into one meaningless number.
Attendance is on by default and can be turned off per group with Enable attendance tracking on the Attendance tab. Turn it off for anything where counting people is beside the point.
What counts as missing
Each group sets its own threshold, under Follow-up after: the number of consecutive sessions somebody can miss before they are flagged for follow-up (Excused counts as missed). The default is three.
Set it to match how often the group meets. Three missed weeks is about a month and is a sensible prompt. Three missed monthly meetings is a quarter, which is far too long to wait, so a monthly group wants a lower number.
What you get back
The flag. Somebody who has missed their group's threshold in a row appears in the Follow-up Queue on the group's Attendance tab, which is the leader's view rather than the office's: the person who would actually notice is the one who sees it. It is a list to check, not an alert: nothing is sent to the leader when someone reaches the threshold. Each name has Snooze (30 days) and Never track buttons, for the person you already know about.
That is the whole feature, and it is deliberately small. It does not score anyone or produce a chart. It answers one question that is genuinely hard to answer by memory: who has stopped coming and nobody has noticed?
Followers
Somebody following the group rather than on its roster can currently show up in the Follow-up Queue. A person who moved to another state shouldn't surface as a pastoral concern every week, so use Never track for them until that's fixed.
Handle it as pastoral care, not attendance-taking
Two things worth saying to leaders when you turn this on:
The flag is a prompt, not a verdict. Most of the time the answer is a new job, a sick parent, or a rota clash. A text that says "missed you, everything alright?" is the entire intended use.
Do not read the numbers out. A group where attendance is discussed as a statistic is a group people stop attending. The data exists so somebody gets a phone call, not so anyone gets a report.