💡 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: You will need to complete the setup process before you can use Auto Absence. Click here to view the setup guide.

The video below explains how to use Auto Absence:

Where do I find Auto Absence?

Auto Absence can be managed by navigating to the Planned Absences page in Arbor. You can reach this in the navigation by going to:  

Students > Attendance > Absentees > Planned Absences

Once you are on the Auto Absence page, you should see some new tabs: 

I can’t see Auto Absence tabs on the Planned Absences page?

This is likely because the setup process hasn’t worked. Please navigate back to the setup page to check that everything is working. You can find the setup page in School > Arbor AI > Auto Absence.

Day-to-Day Management of Auto Absences

Reviewing Pending Absences

Most of your day-to-day management of Auto Absence will happen in the Pending Absence Records tab. The absences that Auto Absence has processed will appear in this tab of the Students > Attendance > Absentees > Planned Absences page.

Viewing and reviewing an absence voicemail

To view or review an absence and/or absence voicemail, simply click on a row for that absence in the table Pending Absence Records tab of the Students > Attendance > Absentees > Planned Absences page.

After you click on a row, the Accept/Reject Pending Absence Note slide-over shows. 

From this slide-over, you can listen to the voicemail message, check and amend details of the absence and choose whether to accept or reject the absence. 

Clicking Cancel will close the slide-over without making any changes.

Once an absence has been accepted, it will be removed from the Pending Absence Records table and recorded as an absence on the student record.

Teachers and other staff will see the absence on registers in the same way they see manually logged absences. See an example of this below:

Using Bulk Actions

From the Pending Absence Records tab of the Students > Attendance > Absentees > Planned Absences page, it’s possible to bulk-accept or reject absences. Bulk actions allow you to process multiple absence records at the same time. 

To do this: 

• Select the absences that you want to handle in bulk by clicking the checkbox on the left side of the table
• Click the Bulk action button and select the action you would like to perform on all of the absences. 

Note: Performing the bulk action will not allow you to listen to each voicemail individually. 

Imported Emails

The Auto Absence | Imported Emails tab on the Students > Attendance > Absentees > Planned Absences page allows you to view all of the emails for your school that have been imported and processed by Auto Absence. You should check this tab daily alongside the Pending Absence Records tab to ensure that all absence emails have been correctly imported and processed. 

Note: If you select Show only voicemail emails as a note creation setting, only emails containing voicemails will be imported. 

Any processing errors will show as a red status. Details of each error type are shown below. 

Tip: You can filter the table for emails with errors by taking these steps

1. Clicking on the 3 vertical dots above the Status column
2. Clicking the Column Filter option in the menu 
3. Unticking the Processed (1 record created) option 
4. Clicking off the filter by clicking anywhere on the page (do not click Reset)

Processed | Error: Unknown absence report

If an absence is recorded from a phone number that isn’t linked to the student’s guardian contact details, then an “Unknown absence reporter” error will be flagged. 

Details of the mismatch are shown in the tooltip when you hover over the error. In this case, an absence will likely need further investigation and may need to be recorded manually. 

Processed | Error: No records created 

This error occurs when Auto Absence is unable to create an absence. Clicking on the row that contains the error will show details of the error.  You can see Arbor AI’s thinking in the grey speech bubble. You may need to manually record this absence.

Voicemail content not found

This error occurs when an email sent to the voicemail mailbox does not contain a voicemail message or the voicemail message it contains could not be transcribed. Click on the error to see who left the message and listen to the voicemail if there is one, but it could not be transcribed. This allows you to decide what to do next with the message, like calling the parent back to ignoring the message, and resolve this manually.

Configuring Auto Absence

You can edit the settings by navigating to the Planned Absences page and clicking on the Auto Absence | Settings tab of the Students > Attendance > Absentees > Planned Absences page. This tab allows you to change some of the settings that you initially set during the setup process. 

Clicking on one of the rows will show a slide-over where you can make changes.

Message Imports and Guardian Matching

This section of the slide-over allows you to make changes to the email mailbox you want to use for Auto Absence and to adjust which guardians calling in Auto Absence can match to students.

Using the Mailbox drop-down, you can change the mailbox you want Auto Absence to monitor for absence voicemail messages.

Using the Guardian Matching, you select whether Auto Absence should process only voicemails from primary guardians for review on the Pending Absence Records tab or if you will allow any guardian linked to a student to report an absence. Find examples of how you can use this setting in this section of our FAQs.

Absence Note Creation

Using the Valid attendance marks dropdown, you can select the attendance marks Auto Absence is allowed to use when creating student record changes from imported emails. If left blank, all attendance marks will be considered, and if marks are specified, only those marks can be used. For further guidance on this, refer to our Auto Absence FAQs.

Note: Most schools will select all of the absence marks by default. However, if there are certain attendance marks that you want to exclude, then you can do that from this slide over.

Ticking the Same day absence only tickbox allows you to set whether the AI will only accept and create absences that are on the same day a voicemail is left by a Guardian. Leaving the box unticked will allow Auto Absence to create Pending Absences for days other than the day the voicemail was left on.

The Note Handling dropdown allows you to select how you want notes to be handled. You can either add the full transcript of the voicemail to the note, just a summary or no note at all. If you select summary, the AI will create a summary of the voicemail and add it to the note (or notes if multiple absence records are created from one voicemail). More on how this works here.

You can either manually set the School day start and end times Auto Absence uses when creating whole-day absences, or let the AI do this for you.

If you select a start time after the start time of the first calendar event (like a lesson) of a school day, Auto Absence won’t create a pending absence that covers this lesson. The same applies to the end time of the school day. If the end time specified in the slide-over is before the end of a lesson, Auto Absence won’t create a pending absence for that session. 

Auto Absence will only use these times when it needs to determine what a 'whole day' absence period. For absences where the message specifies the exact time, auto Absence will use the exact time instead.

To set a fixed time, tick the box next to School day start and end times, then set the times you want in the Fixed start/end time boxes.

Note: Most schools will allow Auto Absence to determine the start and end time of the school day.

Display settings

The Show only voicemail emails option allows you to choose to display all emails or only voicemail emails in the Imported Emails tab. You may want to show all emails if parents can record absences via email. Otherwise, you’ll likely only want to show voicemail emails in the Imported Emails tab. 

Lastly, the Show import errors setting allows you to select whether you would like to see daily import errors in a table, as a warning banner, or not at all on the Pending Absence Records tab. 

Frequently Asked Questions

You can view the Frequently Asked Questions on this page.