Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. That was one of the biggest reasons we built this tool. Google's built-in attendance feature strictly emails the meeting creator—which is useless if a project manager, attendee, or co-host is the one responsible for attendance.

With Attendance Tracker, anyone physically present in the call who has the add-on open can generate a clean attendance report for their own records.

Note for Google Workspace domains: If your school or company enables domain-wide delegation (a quick 2-minute admin setup at attendancetracker.dev/setup), you will also see external and cross-domain attendees. On personal Gmail, you can track anyone sharing the call.

No, absolutely not. Google locks its native attendance tracking behind their most expensive plans: Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade. Most schools and districts can't justify paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in license fees just to see who showed up to class.

Attendance Tracker works across all Google tiers without extra upgrades:

• Google Workspace Education Fundamentals (the free tier most schools use)
• Google Workspace Education Standard
• Google Workspace Business Starter, Standard, Plus & Enterprise
• Personal free @gmail.com accounts

The Google Meet API itself isn't locked behind an expensive tier, so we pass that direct access on to you without the upgrade tax.

Yes! Just sign in with your regular @gmail.com address. If you're an independent tutor, fitness coach, freelancer, or running community meetups, you can track attendee join times, duration, and auto-export straight to Google Sheets for free. No Workspace organization account required.

Yes — this is unique to Attendance Tracker. Any participant can open the Attendance Tracker side panel during the call and tap "I'm here — check in". They sign in with just their Google identity (name and email only — no account is created and no other permissions are requested), and the host instantly sees a verified green ✓ checked-in badge next to that person on the attendance list.

Why this matters:

• Anonymous display names get identified: a participant who joins as "Sam's iPad" checks in with their real school email.
• Dial-in callers get counted: phone participants that Google's roster can't attribute appear on your list via their check-in.
• Verified timestamps: the check-in time flows into your Google Sheets export ("Checked In" column) and the CSV report's Notes column — useful when your attendance policy needs students to actively confirm presence, not just have the tab open.

Check-ins are ephemeral: they expire automatically after 24 hours and are never used for anything except that meeting's attendance record.

You have two ways to export your attendance, both simple and fast:

• Auto-Export (Hands-free): Just leave the side panel open while you teach or meet. When the meeting ends, the add-on automatically generates the spreadsheet in your Google Drive and emails you a summary with the direct link. You don't have to remember to click anything.
• Manual Export (Mid-meeting): If you want an immediate snapshot right now (say, 15 minutes into a quiz or presentation), click the Sheet icon at the top of the side panel. It creates or updates the sheet on the spot.

Step-by-step breakdown: Export Google Meet Attendance to Google Sheets.

Each exported sheet tab is pre-formatted with clean fonts, frozen header rows, and formula-ready columns:

Your sheets live directly inside your own Google Drive in a dedicated folder called Meet Attendance Tracker. Each recurring meeting becomes its own dated tab in a single workbook, keeping your Drive clean.

Privacy: Only you have access by default. We don't host your spreadsheets on our servers. You maintain full ownership and can use standard Google Drive sharing controls whenever you want to share a sheet with a professor, department head, or manager.

When you export a meeting synced with a Google Calendar event, Attendance Tracker compares joined participants against your invited guest list. For any invitee who didn't show up:

1. Before finalizing the export, the calendar matching window shows all absent invitees.
2. Check the Excused checkbox next to anyone who gave advance notice or had an excused absence.
3. The spreadsheet logs them as Absent (excused) instead of an unexcused absence.
4. This tag persists in the series database so multi-week calculations reflect the excused status.

The free tier includes real-time tracking, Class Rosters, and 2 free exports per calendar month across Google Sheets, CSV, or binary Excel (.xlsx) for classes up to 25 attendees (plus 1 large-class grace export) — no credit card required.

Pro is available as a low annual pass or a one-time lifetime pass, with automatic regional pricing in eligible countries:

• Educator Annual Pass — $4.99–$14.99/year: unlimited exports, hands-free Auto-Capture, cumulative Class Summary reports, certificates, LMS gradebook sync, and chat digests, priced for teachers.
• Pro Annual — $29/year: full Pro access for individual organizers, trainers, and team leads.
• Individual Lifetime Pass — $9.99–$29 one-time: pay once and keep Pro forever with no recurring renewals.
• Department — $59/year: covers every teacher on a single school's Google Workspace domain, plus the org-wide team dashboard.
• Institution — $149/year: adds a signed DPA, priority support, and invoice/PO billing for districts.

Full details on the pricing page.

Yes (Pro). After exporting a meeting, click Certificates in the side panel's link bar to generate a per-attendee PDF certificate carrying the attendee's name, session title, date, duration or credit hours, and a unique verification code.

Anyone — a registrar, employer, or licensing board — can confirm a certificate is genuine by entering its code at attendancetracker.dev/verify, no account needed. Popular for CPE/CLE credits, webinars, and corporate training. Full guide: attendance certificates.

If your lecture, seminar, or sprint standup is scheduled as a repeating event on Google Calendar, Attendance Tracker groups all sessions under that series.

Visit your dashboard at attendancetracker.dev/history.html and click the Series tab to see:

• Cumulative attendance across the entire semester (e.g. "Alex attended 26 of 28 classes (93%)")
• Visual attendance percentages and attendance streaks
• Automated drop alerts if someone who regularly attends suddenly misses 3 classes in a row

On the Series tab in history.html, click the Share button next to any series. This creates a secure, read-only link with a customizable 30-day expiration date.

Recipients can view student attendance records, trends, and dates without needing an account or installing the add-on.

No more pasting student names by hand:

1. Open the Class Roster tab in the side panel and click + New Class.
2. Click Import from Google Classroom. The first time, Google asks for a one-time read-only permission covering courses you teach — approving it resumes the import automatically.
3. Pick your course, click Import, review the list, and Save Roster.

Every enrolled student's name and school email fills in, and the imported roster is stored only in your browser. Full guide: Import a Google Classroom roster.

With a Class Roster active, the roster tab shows Export gradebook CSV: Moodle · Canvas. One click downloads an import-ready gradebook file — Moodle's First name / Last name / Email address layout or Canvas's Student / SIS Login ID layout — with each student's attendance percentage as the grade (unexcused absences import as 0; excused absences stay blank).

For recurring classes, the Series tab in Meeting History exports one cumulative gradebook row per student across the whole semester (Pro).

Guides: Moodle · Canvas.

You can post automatic attendance summaries directly into team Slack channels (like #eng-standup or #ta-room) in under a minute:

1. Create an Incoming Webhook in your Slack workspace (api.slack.com/messaging/webhooks).
2. In the Attendance Tracker side panel, click the Settings (gear) icon and pick the Slack tab in the webhooks card.
3. Paste your Slack Incoming Webhook URL, click Send test, and save.
4. Whenever a meeting ends or you export, a clean Block Kit summary card posts to your channel with present, late, and absent counts, plus a direct button to open the Google Sheet.

Step-by-step setup: How to Send Google Meet Attendance to Slack.

Yes. The same webhooks card in Settings has Slack, Google Chat, and Discord tabs — each takes that provider's incoming-webhook URL, and each configured provider gets its own native attendance card after every export (a cardsV2 card in Chat spaces, an embed in Discord channels). You can connect all three at once.

Full guide: Send attendance to Google Chat or Discord.

Whenever an attendance sheet is generated upon meeting conclusion, a clean digest email lands in your inbox. It gives you a quick snapshot of attendance percentages, who was late, who missed class, and a one-click button to open the spreadsheet directly in Google Sheets.

Google Workspace security policy restricts participant queries to users within the organizer's domain unless domain delegation is enabled.

If you see a notice saying "Some participants may not appear", your Workspace administrator can enable service account delegation in under two minutes:

1. Send your Google Workspace IT admin this link: attendancetracker.dev/setup.
2. In the Google Admin Console (admin.google.com), they navigate to Security > Access and data control > API controls.
3. They add our Client ID and the read-only Meet scope.

Once approved, external guests, parents, and cross-domain attendees will appear in your live roster.

This is an honest quirk of Google's official Meet REST API: it has a 2 to 5 minute propagation delay when updating attendee states.

If an attendee's WiFi briefly drops or they refresh their browser tab, Google's API might briefly report their previous session as ended before broadcasting the new session ID. Don't worry—Attendance Tracker connects multiple sessions under the same participant and merges them upon export, so their total active duration and final attendance percentage stay accurate.

To record attendance: You need to be on a desktop or laptop browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox). Google Meet's native iOS and Android apps do not support side-panel add-ons yet (that is a Google platform limitation, not ours).

To view and manage reports: Everything works great on mobile! You can open your exported Google Sheets, view the history.html dashboard, and receive Slack/email alerts right from your phone or tablet. For tips, read Google Meet Attendance on iPad & Mobile.

That's expected. Google Meet runs add-ons in a locked-down frame that silently blocks direct file downloads, so Attendance Tracker hands your file to a small helper tab on attendancetracker.dev that performs the download and tells you when it's done — then you can close it.

If nothing opens at all, your browser's pop-up blocker caught the tab: allow pop-ups for meet.google.com and click download again.

The side panel is localized in 60 languages — including Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Tagalog, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and more. It detects your browser language automatically, and you can switch any time from the Settings modal's language selector.

We ask for the absolute bare minimum permissions needed to take attendance:

• meetings.space.readonly — Reads who is currently in your Meet call and when they join or leave.
• calendar.events.readonly — Reads matching calendar invitees to identify no-shows and calculate late arrivals.
• drive.file — Creates and updates attendance spreadsheets in your Drive. Notice this is drive.file, not full Google Drive access—we can only view and edit spreadsheets created by Attendance Tracker, never your personal files, docs, or photos.
• Optional: classroom.courses.readonly, classroom.rosters.readonly, and classroom.profile.emails — requested only if you click "Import from Google Classroom", to list the courses you teach and copy a course's student names and emails into a Class Roster. Read-only, and the imported roster stays in your browser — never on our servers.

Never. We literally cannot. The add-on does not have access to your camera, microphone, screen shares, or chat text. It purely collects roster metadata: names, arrival times, and departure times.

Yes. Data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.3 and at rest using AES-256-GCM. We do not sell student or user data, and we never use your meeting records to train artificial intelligence models. Our architecture adheres to standard FERPA and COPPA privacy principles for educational institutions.

Review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for full details.

Just send an email to legal@kinetichelix.io with the subject line "Data Deletion Request". We will permanently wipe your account and stored session data within 30 days. The Google Sheets in your own Google Drive remain entirely yours to keep or delete as you wish.