Inactivity alerts
The nightly job that tells you a student has stopped coming — the threshold, who it emails, and why it never repeats.
An inactivity alert tells you — and optionally the family — when an actively enrolled student has stopped turning up. It is the app's one piece of retention automation, and it runs every night without anyone pressing anything.
Students then Alerts is the screen: a configuration card at the top, and the log of everything that has been sent underneath.
Setting it up
Inactivity Alert Configuration has two things in it.
Days of Inactivity Threshold — a whole number between 1 and 365. How many days of no attendance before a student counts as lapsed. Two to three weeks is a common choice: long enough to survive a holiday, short enough that a phone call can still bring them back.
Notification Targets — three tick boxes, any combination:
| Target | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| Notify Studio (admin email) | Your studio's Contact Email from Studio then General. |
| Notify Student | The student's own email address, if they have one. |
| Notify Parent/Guardian | The primary guardian's email address. |
Save Configuration turns the job on for your studio.
Nothing happens until you save this form once
A studio with no configuration is skipped entirely. Saving it is the on switch — there is no separate enable toggle.
And there is no off switch either: unticking all three targets is how you turn alerts off. With nobody to notify, the job does no work for your studio.
What counts as "attended"
Only Present and Late count as having been to class.
Excused does not. That is deliberate — an excused absence is still an absence, and counting it as a visit would hide exactly the student the alert exists to find.
Which means the alert is only as good as your attendance-taking. A studio that does not mark classes gets alerts about students who have been training all month. Use Mark N remaining absent on the attendance sheet to finish sheets properly — see Taking attendance.
Who is in scope
Every student with at least one active enrollment. Inactive and suspended enrollments are out of scope entirely, which is the right behaviour for somebody you have already marked as gone or taking a break.
Two students are deliberately skipped:
- Anybody who has attended within the threshold window.
- Anybody whose earliest active enrollment is itself inside the window. A student who joined four days ago has not "stopped coming" — they are new.
A student who has never attended at all is still alerted on, once. The day count reported for them is their time on the roster, which is the honest number: "signed up 46 days ago and has never walked in" is exactly the case worth knowing about.
When it runs, and how often it repeats
The job runs once a night.
One alert per absence, not one per night
"Jimmy hasn't been in for 30 days" is true again tomorrow, and the day after, and for as long as Jimmy stays away. A studio that gets that email every morning stops reading any alert at all.
So: one alert per student per absence. It fires once, and does not fire again for the same lapse. It re-fires only after the student comes back and then lapses again — a different absence, so a different alert.
There is no "resolve" or "dismiss" action, and none is needed. An alert is a notification, not a ticket.
Two other limits worth knowing about, both there to stop a mailbox flood on the first night after a studio switches this on:
- At most 50 alerts per studio per night, longest absence first. Anyone over the cap is simply first in line tomorrow, so a long backlog drains over a few nights rather than arriving at once.
- A student the studio asked to notify but who has no email address on file at all is skipped and not logged — so filling in the missing address later still gets them an alert rather than being permanently silently claimed.
The Alert Log
Underneath the configuration: every alert that has been sent, most recent first.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Student | Name and photo. |
| Days Absent | How long since they were last seen. |
| Last Attendance | The date, or blank if they have never attended. |
| Notified At | When the email went out. |
| Targets Notified | Which of studio / student / parent were actually emailed. |
Note that last column: it records who was actually reached, not who you asked for. A row showing only studio on a config with all three boxes ticked means that family has no email address on file.
An empty log reads "No alerts have been triggered yet." On a new configuration that is normal — nothing is sent until the first night after you save.
Using it well
- Set the threshold to the point where a phone call still works. An alert at 60 days is a record of a student you have already lost.
- Start with the studio box only. Decide whether a lapse email from the app is the right tone for your families before you send them one.
- Read the log weekly, not the emails. The log is a list of who to ring.
- Take the register. Everything here depends on it.
What it is not
- It is not a report. For the fuller picture — at-risk students, retention, engagement over time — see the membership reports.
- It does not change anything. No enrollment is suspended, no billing is touched, nothing is flagged on the student's record.
- There is only one alert type. Inactivity is the whole feature; there is no birthday, expiring-card or overdue-payment alert on this screen.
Last reviewed