Attendance and hours
Every hour this platform credits to a volunteer comes from one of two places: an organizer confirming they were there, or the volunteer logging it and the organization approving it. Both are on your dashboard, and neither happens on its own.
Confirm who turned up
The Volunteers tab lists everyone who signed up, across every opportunity, with a search box and a filter by opportunity. Each row has Attended and Absent, and they are exclusive: leaving both empty means nobody has decided yet.
For one opportunity at a time, the volunteer count on the Needs tab opens the same list for that opportunity alone. On a past event that view adds Mark Remaining Attended and Mark Remaining Absent, which touch only the rows nobody has marked. A deliberate mark is never overwritten by a bulk action.
This is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is expensive. Hours are credited from confirmed attendance, so a shift nobody marks up is a shift where every volunteer earned nothing and your own reports read as zero. It takes a minute, and it is the only record that the day happened.
Attendance counts the guests a volunteer brought as well, which is why the signup form asks for a number rather than leaving people to bring who they like unannounced. A volunteer’s own total shows their hours; your reports multiply by the party they arrived with.
Download CSV on the Volunteers tab exports the list as you have filtered it: name, email, guests, opportunity, date, whether they attended, and the answers to your signup questions.
What gets credited
The hours credited for a shift are the Estimated Shift Hours on the opportunity at the moment you mark attendance. Editing that estimate afterwards never rewrites hours already credited, so a correction to a listing cannot quietly restate last month’s history. Unmarking somebody, or marking them absent, removes the credit.
Approve hours volunteers logged
Volunteers can log their own time on an opportunity they joined. Those land on the Approvals tab, which carries a count of what is waiting.
Each row shows the volunteer (or the guest email they signed up with), the opportunity, the hours claimed, and where the claim came from. You can:
- Approve or Reject one at a time. A rejection asks for a short reason, and the volunteer sees that reason on their own My Hours tab.
- Select several and approve or reject them in one pass.
- Filter by source, when you want to look at self-reported claims alone.
Nothing counts until it is approved. A pending or rejected claim never appears in your reports, your exports, or any public figure.
The deviation flag
A yellow note appears on a claim whose hours look implausible: more than twice the shift estimate the opportunity carried when the claim was filed, or over twelve hours when there was no estimate to compare against. It is advisory. It never blocks an approval, and it never flags somebody for claiming less than the posted shift, because leaving early is normal.
The estimate it compares against is the one captured with the claim, so changing a listing later does not move an existing flag.
The two settings
Both are in the org profile editor, under Hours & Approvals, and both are owner-only.
| Setting | Options | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Self-reported hours | Manual review, Auto-approve | Whether volunteer claims wait in your Approvals queue or count the moment they are submitted. |
| Hours display format | Decimal (6.5 hrs), Hours + min (6h 30m) | How hours read across your dashboard and reports, and how volunteers are asked to enter them. |
Manual review is the right default for most organizations. Auto-approve is reasonable for a long-running opportunity with regulars you know.
A third switch, Auto-approve QR check-ins, covers hours captured by QR check-in and is separate from the self-reported setting above it.
Any single opportunity can override the org-wide self-report setting from its own form, under Self-reported hours approval. Left on Inherit org default, it follows the setting above.
Who can do this
Owners and editors mark attendance and work the approvals queue. Viewers see neither tab: they get the aggregate numbers and no volunteer personal data. See invite your team.