Information, Resources and Updates for KidCheck Users

Launch Day was Yesterday!

We launched a new church yesterday and used KidCheck to handle the children's area. We checked in 50 kids on our first day! Overall it went pretty well, especially given I have 20 families who did not have KidCheck accounts prior to arriving.

Here are some questions I have after yesterday:

1) Guardian Bar Codes... don't seem to work as I would have expected. We found a lost Guardian Receipt on the floor and I tried to scan it to find out whose it was, but it said the bar code wasn't recognized. I had to just hold it until the mom came back and told me she lost it... Similarly, we were collecting the guardian receipts at checkout (after matching the codes to the codes on the kids' stickers). I mistakenly thought I could just scan the guardian receipt to bring up the checkout for all kids in that family. It was frustrating to have to check out each kid at a time. Am I missing something here? Why can't the guardian receipt pull up the family, and then let you verify the children being checked out?

2) Attendance Totals... is there a way to pull up attendance totals without stopping check-in? Or is it normal that most churches stop check-in at some point, run the attendance numbers, and then restart check-in for check-out?

3) Alphanumeric codes... is there a way to use the same alphanumeric codes for each family each week? We are having some parents not recognize their number up on the screen. They commented that if it was the same every week they could memorize it and be more likely to recognize it when their child needed them. Makes sense.

4) Child Volunteers... is there a way to designate a child (middle/high student) as a volunteer? Right now they are in the system as children of a guardian, but we have some of our middle/high kids that also volunteer in the little kids' area some weeks, and should be identified as such on their stickers.

OK. I think that is if for right now. I'm sure I will have more questions as we progress. Thanks KidCheck for making this go so smoothly!

Wendy

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ben Wickstrom on March 22, 2011 at 8:48am

Hi Wendy, I'll try my best to answer your questions.

1. KidCheck is not designed to be able to just scan a the guardian receipt to check out kids. There is a very big security risk in that which you already found. If someone were to find a guardian receipt on the ground then they could check out a child that did not belong to them. One way to check out all the kids at once is to have the guardian scan their key tag or enter their phone number again and all of their children will be available for checkout at the bottom of the page and you can check them all out at once. One thing to note, most churches do not do a checkout through the program. Most will just do a visual verification of the security codes and that is when they release the child to the parent and then the system automatically checks everyone out at midnight. Unless you need a time stamp of when they left, doing a manual checkout through the system is not necessary.

2. You can pull up attendance totals on any computer with an internet connection so if you have another computer that you can check that on you can do that, otherwise you would need to close check-in to run a report. Another option is from the check-in screen you can click on the "Admin Console" at the top right of your screen and that will show all kids currently checked in and you can sort by location.

3. No, you cannot use the same codes every week. The reason for this is it is a huge security risk to do this. Someone could pick up a guardian receipt from the prior week and be able to check out that child the next week. Because of this reason the system is specifically designed to randomly generate the security code.

4. Just have them create a guardian account and add them as a volunteer like you would any other volunteer. Even if the parent adds the student as an authorized guardian that would work fine.

Hopefully this helps.

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Permalink Reply by Wendy Willard on March 23, 2011 at 7:40am

Thanks. I have another question...

We are in the eastern time zone. I have set this correctly in the Account Info, but our Campus Information still says we are in the Mountain time zone. Because of this, the time is wrong when we run check-in. How can I fix this?

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Permalink Reply by Ben Wickstrom on March 24, 2011 at 11:15am

I believe that must be a bug in the Campus information area. Just make sure it says eastern time zone in your account info area. The check-in screen clock is tied to your clock on your computer so make sure you have the correct time zone selected on your computer.