Attendance on Free vs Paid Plans: What Actually Changes

Every tuition centre owner asks some version of the same question when they compare plans: "what am I actually losing if I stay on Free?" For attendance specifically, the honest answer is: nothing about marking today's attendance. What changes on paid plans is how fast you can manage attendance across many days at once.

The distinction that matters

We don't think attendance itself should ever be a paywall. A tutor with 8 students marking who showed up today is exactly the kind of daily, essential workflow that belongs on every plan, forever. So here's what's actually free — permanently, no trial, no countdown:

Attendance capability	Free	Starter+
Mark attendance for a single day	✅	✅
Mark attendance student-by-student	✅	✅
View daily attendance	✅	✅
Select a week or month in one screen	❌	✅
Mark attendance for multiple dates at once	❌	✅
Review a student's attendance across multiple dates	❌	✅
Bulk attendance entry and editing	❌	✅

Notice what's on the left column: every core action a tutor needs to run a single day of class. Notice what's on the right: everything that only starts to matter once you're managing enough students, batches, or history that clicking through one day at a time becomes the bottleneck.

Why we drew the line here, specifically

The honest framing isn't "Free users have limited attendance." It's:

Free: Daily attendance. Paid: Bulk and historical attendance management.

That's a meaningful difference in practice. A solo tutor with one batch of 10 students opens Attendance, picks today, taps through the list, and is done in under a minute — nothing about that workflow needs a week view. A coaching centre running 12 batches across three time slots, or a teacher catching up on a week they were traveling, is a completely different problem: reviewing and correcting attendance one day at a time doesn't scale, and clicking the same checkbox thirty times to backfill a week is exactly the kind of manual tedium a management system is supposed to remove.

So the upgrade isn't "unlock a feature you were missing." It's "stop doing this the slow way."

What the paid experience actually looks like

On Starter and above, Attendance gets two additional views alongside the daily one:

Week view — pick a batch, see every student against every day of the week in one grid, and mark or correct any cell without leaving the screen:

Student	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
Arun	✓	✓	A	✓	✓	–
Ravi	✓	A	✓	✓	A	–
Priya	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	–

Month view — the same grid stretched across a full month, which is what actually makes a monthly attendance report, a fee-linked attendance policy, or a parent's "how many classes did my child miss this month" question answerable in seconds instead of a manual tally.

Both views support editing directly in the grid, so correcting a mismarked day from two weeks ago is a single click, not a hunt through daily records one date at a time.

The practical trigger to upgrade

If you're a solo tutor and you've never once wished you could see a week at a glance, Free genuinely has everything you need for attendance — that's by design, not a limitation we hope you'll bump into. The moment you notice yourself thinking "I wish I didn't have to click into every single day to fix last week," that's the actual signal it's time to move to Starter, not a marketing nudge trying to manufacture urgency.

Where this fits in TuitionDesk overall

This is the same logic behind most of TuitionDesk's Free-to-paid boundaries: the daily, essential action stays free everywhere, and what unlocks with a paid plan is scale — more students, more teachers, more batches, and now, faster ways to manage history across all of them. Fees work the same way: recording a single payment is available to everyone, while automated fee schedules and bulk reminders sit on paid tiers. Attendance follows the identical pattern.

Curious what bulk attendance actually feels like once you're managing more than a handful of students? See TuitionDesk's plans →