Mealtime Attendance

Updated July 10, 2025 17:42
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Mealtime Attendance helps streamline dining operations and compliance through effortless tracking of resident participation in meals. This feature empowers teams to capture critical dining and nutrition information through the use of Observation Notes.

Enable Mealtime Attendance

This feature is behind an entitlement and requires the ALIS team to enable. Once the entitlement is turned on, the Attendance icon will be visible on the Dashboard for users with access. Staff require specific security role permissions to be able to record and/or reset attendance. For assistance with enabling the entitlement and configuring security roles, contact your Account Manager or our ALIS Customer Success Team.

Configure Meal Times

Attendance is recorded per Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner mealtimes. The timeframes of each mealtime can be fully customized in Resident Settings to align with your dining operations. For assistance with configuring mealtimes, contact your Account Manager or our ALIS Customer Success Team.

To adjust your own mealtimes, follow the steps below:

Navigate to Settings > Resident.
Scroll down to the Mealtime Attendance section.
Click on the dropdown menus to set the start and end times for each meal.
Click Save to update. These new mealtimes will be automatically reflected in the main Attendance page.

Record Mealtime Attendance

Click on the Dashboard icon to open the main Attendance page. The page will default to the current day (Today) and automatically select the meal timeframe (based on Resident Settings and the time it is right now).

If you need to record attendance outside of these defaults:

Click on the top lefthand Change button if you need to record attendance for a different date than the current date. This pulls up a calendar for you to choose a date from.
Click on the Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner lefthand sidebars to select the mealtime for which you want to take attendance.

Start Recording

To begin recording attendance, click the blue Start Recording button in the center of the screen. This action opens a table with a list of your current residents.

Any residents who have already been marked as "On Leave" on their profile will be automatically recorded as "On Leave" and the location will appear in the Destination column (if applicable). Note that this automatic selection also occurs if you change the date, so it is important to verify a resident's On Leave dates when recording attendance retroactively.

If there is a resident who is currently On Leave but this is not displayed on the table, this most likely means they have not been set to "On Leave" on their profile. While you can manually select the On Leave circle to record attendance accurately on this page, you will still need to navigate to the resident profile to put the resident On Leave for them to appear as such across ALIS and keep your records up-to-date. Refer to this How to Set a Resident "On Leave" guide for more information.

To record attendance for the rest of your residents, scroll and click on the open circles to record whether a resident is Present or Not Present for the meal. All records taken save automatically.

If you have made an error in selection, you can either click on the correct one to switch the recording or click the Clear button to reset that individual record.

If there are more holistic errors and you need to clear all entries, click the red Reset Attendance button at the bottom of the page. When you confirm the reset, all records will be cleared for that mealtime on that date.

Remember that the ability to reset recorded attendance is behind a security role permission and requires the ALIS team to update. First contact your company administrator to confirm you have the appropriate level of access. Otherwise, reach out to your Account Manager or our ALIS Customer Success Team for assistance with updating security role permissions.

Record Observation

There are +Observation buttons next to each resident's attendance record to empower your team to capture important dining and nutrition information while taking attendance. It is recommended practice to record an observation if a resident is marked as Not Present to document the reason for their absence.

When you click the +Observation button, this opens a righthand pane and pre-fills the resident name as well as the current date and time. Enter other required details, then click the Create Observation button to save. Note that the attendance page will not reflect when an observation has already been created, however you can view the observation details in the Resident Profile, Observation Center, Daily Stand-Up Report, etc. depending on your level of access. Refer to this Guide to Observations article for more information.

Audit Completion in Attendance

For a quick and high-level audit of Mealtime records, review the Mealtimes section on the lefthand side of the Attendance page. As attendance is being recorded, ALIS tracks the total number of entries in real time.

On each meal sidebar, you will see the total number of entries that have been recorded and the number that is outstanding. This can help your team ensure that all residents' attendance has been recorded per meal.