💡 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: 

Can’t see the new tabs?

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 Absenses

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. 

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. 

After you click on a row, the ‘Accept/Reject Pending Absence Note’ slide-over will be shown. 

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 against the student. 

Example of the attendance register with an absence recorded using Auto Absence: 

Using  bulk actions

From the ‘Pending Absence Records’ tab, 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
• On the ‘Bulk action’ button, select the action that 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 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 of the absence emails have been correctly imported and processed. 

Note: If you selected ‘Show only voicemail emails’ as a setting, then only emails that contain 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: 

1. Clicking on the 3 dots above the ‘Status’ column
2. Clicking the ‘Column Filter’ option in the popout 
3. Unticking the “Processed (1 record created)” option is unticked

Processed | Error: Unknown absence reporter

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.

Configuring Auto Absence

You can edit the settings by navigating to the Planned Absences page and clicking on the ‘Auto Absence | Settings’ tab. 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if someone who is not a primary guardian calls to record an absence?

Arbor will not process the message. You will still be able to view the message in the ‘Auto Absence Emails’ tab, but the absence will need to be triaged by a member of staff. 

What happens if a voicemail is left about something other than an absence? 

Arbor AI only creates an absence note if it determines that the voicemail is about an absence and the phone call was received from a telephone number belonging to the child’s primary guardian. 

You can still listen to and triage non-absence-related voicemails in the ‘Auto Absence Imported Emails’ tab. 

The screenshot below shows an example voicemail that wasn’t linked to an absence.

Email mailbox

This slide-over allows you to make changes to the email mailbox that you want to use for Auto Absence. 

Show only voicemail emails?

This 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. 

Attendance marks

This setting lets you determine which attendance marks Auto Absence can choose when deciding the absence reason from the voicemail. 

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.

School day

Set the school day’s start and end times Auto Absence will use when creating absences. If you select a start time that is after the first calendar event of the school day (e.g. a lesson), then 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 the school day, then Auto Absence won’t create a pending absence for that session. 

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