Attendance is money, so the record has to hold up

Three ways to take attendance

Every department needs attendance, and not every department needs the same rigor.

The simplest way is an officer checking members off a list. It happens on the incident report, the drill record, or the training record, in RedAlert Desktop or from a phone in RedAlert Mobile. Same list, same records, whichever screen you're on. For plenty of departments, that's the whole answer.

The RedAlert Kiosk is what you add when the answer needs to be verified. It's a touchscreen station mounted in the firehouse where members check in themselves by fingerprint, key fob, or building ID card, inside a time window tied to the actual call, with a photograph taken at check-in. Nobody is vouching for anybody.

All three write to the same member record and feed the same calculations. The difference is whether attendance is reported or proven.

Why departments add the Kiosk

For most volunteer and combination departments, attendance decides who gets paid and how much, and it's usually public money. That makes the record an accounting document.

The common setup is a clipboard by the door and a spreadsheet one member maintains. It works until somebody questions it. A member disputes their total. A board asks how the numbers were derived. An auditor wants documentation. A municipality asks what controls exist on a program distributing taxpayer funds. “Dave keeps the spreadsheet” is not an answer to any of those.

The Kiosk closes that gap by controlling when check-in is possible and requiring members to be physically in the station to do it. For a call, it opens automatically on a CAD trigger your department picks: the start of the alarm, the end of the alarm, when the last unit clears, or an officer opening it manually. Then it closes on a window you set (thirty minutes, four hours, end of shift, etc.). Once that window expires the call is locked, and nobody wanders in tomorrow to tag themselves onto yesterday's structure fire. Scheduled events work the same way, opening a set number of minutes before a drill and closing after it ends.

An administrator can still make a correction in RedAlert Desktop for legitimate edge cases. The difference is that the adjustment is deliberate, made by someone with authority, and visible in the record as an adjustment.

Your plan document, not our template

Award programs differ by state, by county, and by plan. Point caps. Category maximums. Eligibility thresholds. Different weights for a structure fire than for a business meeting. Minimum call percentages. Programs that pay per call, programs that pay a flat stipend, programs that award points toward a benefit years out.

RedAlert is configured to your rules. If your program does something unusual, Alpine builds it to match rather than asking your board to amend the plan.

Beyond attendance

The Kiosk also handles duty crew clock-in and clock-out, so a shift scheduled for 10:00 to 18:00 can be measured against a member who actually walked in at 10:30. Because the device is in the station, that's a true clock-in rather than a self-report.

It runs department elections, with anonymous ballots and one vote per member enforced by credential, recording who voted and when without recording how. And members check their own point totals, call counts, and hours at the device, so someone three drills short of qualifying finds out in November rather than January.