If you read the  recent post about changes to the Week at a Glance and Meetings Report, you will know that we are now reporting headcounts on the Meetings Report in the column labeled Count. Along with this change in reporting, is also a change in how headcounts are treated. 

For meetings in which you need to record individual attendance and then want to record a headcount, you can now enter the headcount without having to change the meeting type. The use case would be a worship organization where you are recording attendance of those who mark a card. You know there were more there that did not mark their card and you want to also capture a total headcount too. Before, you would have had to record the individuals who marked themselves, then change to a headcount meeting and enter the number. The problem with that approach was that you would have lost the ability to keep track of attendance %. 

To understand why attendance % does not work for headcount meetings, it is helpful to know how the two types of meetings work. For organizations with members, when you create a headcount meeting, everyone is given an Attend Type of group. In other words, they are not considered either absent or present. This means that their attendance percentage is not affected by this meeting. For regular meetings, members of the organization are all marked absent when the meeting is created, thus affecting the %.

Now you can have the best of both meeting types. You can preserve the absences for members who were not recorded as present and still show the total headcount. 

Another benefit of this change, is that the Email Attendance Notices will work for those classes that record individual attendance and then add a headcount. The Recent Absents will work because those not marked present will have an Attend Type of absent and not group. These use cases are primarily for those classes that are not capturing information about their guests, so the difference between the Individual Attendance and the Headcount Attendance represents unidentified guests.

For headcount type meetings in which you only record a headcount, then add the guests--this will work as it always has.

Exception:

There is a setting that you can add to your church database that still forces you to change the Meeting Type from Regular to Headcount if you want to record a count that is higher than the individual attendance. That setting ID is RegularMeetingHeadCount and the setting is disable.

Here's why you might want to use this setting: