Setting up Arbor Auto Absence

💡 Auto Absence has now graduated from Arbor Labs. If you are interested in purchasing Auto Absence for your school, please register your interest here

What is Auto Absence?

Arbor’s Auto Absence feature automatically creates pending absence notes from your parent or guardian's voicemails. 

Note: Auto Absence is an add-on to your Arbor MIS subscription.

Who is this document for?

This document is for schools that have purchased Auto Absence and are ready to start the setup process. To set up Auto Absence, follow the step-by-step process in this document.

We’ve also created this helpful video on how to complete the setup. 

Absence voicemail and email requirements

To access Arbor’s Auto Absence, you will need:

1. A phone line for parents and guardians to report absences, where they can leave a voicemail with the absence.
2. Your school’s phone provider supports voicemail-to-email, where the voicemails left by parents/guardians are forwarded to an email address that is separate from your school’s main email address.
3. A Microsoft email account. Support for Google will be added later. 
4. This part is really important: The person setting up Auto Absence is an administrator of the email account that you want to use with Auto Absence, and that you can login via Microsoft login. 
   • This will likely mean reaching out to your IT department to permit you, or having them on hand to authorise the email account
5. You must have the ‘School Communications Administer’ and ‘School Ask Arbor Administer’ permissions

How to Setup Auto Absence

If at any point you get stuck, you can click on the ‘I want to start again’ button in the top right-hand corner of the page. 

1. Set your Auto Absence email address

For Auto Absence to work, you need to set the email address that is to be used to receive absence emails with attached voicemails.

If you can't see the email address that you want to use in the dropdown. Type in or copy and paste the email address into the drop-down and then hit the 'Enter' key on your keyboard. 

This will add the email address. If you're unsure how to do this, please see the video at the top of the page.

When you’re happy with the email address, click ‘Save changes’. 

2. Email import setup

A secondary email address must be authorised for import via IMAP.

Steps:

• Click to set up email import and select the relevant secondary email address.
• Confirm and authorise the import by signing into the associated account (e.g. Microsoft).
• You can disable importing emails from unnecessary folders like “Sent Items.”. Only import the folder the forwarded voicemails are going into.
• A green tick confirms the mailbox is set to import.

Note: Google email addresses are not yet supported. This functionality is coming soon.

3. Connection status check

Verify the selected mailbox is connected and active.

• A green tick indicates success.
• A red cross means the mailbox isn’t connected—revisit the email import settings to resolve.

4. Auto absence mailbox settings

Configure your settings for processing imported emails.

Steps:

• Select the imported mailbox (only one will appear if only one is set up).
• Choose valid attendance marks the AI can assign, such as “Illness” or “Medical Appointment.”
• Define school day start and end times (the AI uses this for absences where the message says the student is going to be off all day)
  • Automatic: Uses each student’s specific timetable to interpret absence times.
  • Fixed: Applies the same times (e.g., 8:30–3:30) for everyone

Tip: These settings can be modified later as needed.

5. Email import validation: Confirm that emails are being successfully imported into the selected mailbox.

• Check for a green tick next to the mailbox in Auto Absence.
• If emails aren’t importing, ensure the mailbox is connected (Step 4) and check that the mailbox has incoming messages on your provider.

Note: This step can sometimes take up to 10 minutes to confirm as we only import emails every 10 minutes. Once the Auto Absence functionality is up and running, we will import every minute.

6. Audio attachment check

Ensure at least one imported email contains an audio attachment (voicemail).

• Check the imported emails in School Communications > School Mailbox.
• Confirm that at least one email includes an attached voicemail file.

To test this step, you may need to call your absence line and record an absence for a student. You can always reject the absence. 

7. Phone number verification

Confirm that a phone number is included in either the sender, subject or body of at least one imported email. This information is critical for linking a voicemail to the correct student.

• Review the sender, subject and body in the School Mailbox.
• If the phone number of the person leaving the message is not found in either sender, subject or body, we will need to look at whether we can make it work with your provider, so please contact Arbor via Arbor HQ.

8. Switching on Auto Absence

You are now ready to switch on the Auto Absence functionality.

Click the ‘Auto Absence’ row at the bottom of section 8, scroll down to the bottom of the slide over and click “Switch on”.

Once activated, two new tabs appear in Planned Absences under Students > Attendance > Absentees:

• Auto Absence | Imported Emails: This shows imported emails (initially marked as “Pending”). Note: We will only process emails automatically on the day they arrive (this is to avoid duplicate processing)
• Auto Absence | Settings: Displays and allows editing of the configured settings.

Need help? 

This feature is in Arbor Labs, so we cannot provide support over the phone or via the Arbor chatbot.  If you have a question or need help, please reach out via the dedicated space in Arbor HQ.