Track Attendance Online with Best Attendance

Monika Jansen Oct 4, 2011 Tweet

Many fabulously successful companies are born out of a simple need.  Google made finding information online easier.  Facebook made it easy to keep in touch with friends.  Starbucks brought coffee culture and appreciation to the US.  While Best Attendance might not reach the level of those companies, they are making it easy for volunteer organizations to track attendance online.

Best Attendance keeps you organized as you take attendance (scanning barcodes, letting members log in on the computer), share event calendars, update your roster, and communicate with members via email.  Given that their target market is schools and community organizations, pricing is reasonable: $12/month for 10 member and up to $65/month for more than 500 members.

Founder Joel Roggenkamp is a business teacher, consultant, and independent software vendor in Minneapolis, and this is actually his 3^rd startup.  Best Attendance began way back in 2004 when he needed an easy way to track attendance for his Civil Air Patrol squadron.  “We tried paper-based and Excel-based approaches, which failed miserably, and no software on the market met our needs,” he said in an email.  “Increasing sales led to the release of a web application in 2011.”

So yes, there is other membership management software on the market, but it is big and expensive, and they all try to solve problems that many organizations don’t have, such as event registration, accounting, managing fund drives, private social networks, and project management.  Best Attendance, therefore, focuses on just membership management and attendance tracking.

If you are heading to Tech Cocktail Minneapolis tonight, you can meet Joel and see Best Attendance in action, as they are one of our showcased startups.