Frequently Asked Questions

Any institution that hands children back to an authorized adult at the end of the day. That covers public and private K-12 schools, elementary and primary schools, middle and high schools, kindergartens, preschools and pre-K programs, Montessori and faith-based schools, supplementary schools meeting one day a week, whether that is a weekend or a weekday, daycare and childcare centers, and after-school, enrichment and summer programs. The moving parts are the same in all of them: a roster, a list of who is allowed to collect each child, and a verified handoff at the door.

Yes, and the youngest rooms are often where it matters most, because a three-year-old cannot tell you whether the adult at the door is the right one. Parents and approved delegates request pickup from their phone, a staff member confirms the child at the door, and the handoff is time-stamped. Children too small to carry a card are not a problem—the door screen accepts a camera scan, a barcode reader or a typed ID, so schools usually keep the cards in a classroom folder rather than on a lanyard around a four-year-old.

For the arrival and release side, yes. Staff record arrivals at the door, parents and approved delegates request collection, and every entry and exit is time-stamped and exportable—which is usually what a licensing visit asks to see. It is worth being clear about what it is not: AuthExit does not handle billing and invoicing, staff-to-child ratio tracking, or meal, nap and diaper logs. If those are what you are shopping for, a full childcare management suite is the better fit and AuthExit will not replace it.

No. There is no minimum roster size, and because everything runs on phones and tablets you already own, there is no hardware outlay that only pays off at scale. Small schools tend to be running soonest—the roster upload is short and there are fewer staff to train.

AuthExit creates a closed-loop verification system. Students are only dismissed when an authorized guardian makes a request, and their exit is verified by a staff member scanning their ID at the vehicle. Every step is time-stamped and logged.

None required. AuthExit runs on any standard smartphone, tablet, or computer, and every scan works through the device’s own camera—at the door and at the library desk, reading QR codes and older one-dimensional barcodes alike. Staff can also type an ID by hand, so a flat battery never stops a dismissal. Staff can use their own devices or school-issued tablets, and parents access the system via a secure progressive web app—no app store download required. A dedicated USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner is worth having where one desk handles real volume, such as a busy library counter; it is optional, not included in the subscription, and bought from any supplier you like—we do not resell them.

No, it is online only as of now. Our Progressive Web App (PWA) architecture ensures that critical dismissal flows continue to function efficiently with a stable internet connection.

You send it as a spreadsheet and we load it into Master Data for you during onboarding. After that your Super Admin maintains the student list from the Master Data screen—adding a student, correcting a name or changing a grade takes effect immediately, with no re-import needed. Attendance is never uploaded: it is produced day by day from door scans and teacher entry.

Yes. Each school is a separate tenant with its own roster, staff, settings and data, and no school can see another’s information. A family or staff member with access to more than one school can switch between them from inside the app without signing out. There is no single dashboard spanning every campus today—if your organization runs several and needs one consolidated view, we will build it; tell us what you need to see and we will scope it with you. Each campus also keeps its own local time zone, so a 3:15 PM dismissal reads as 3:15 PM locally no matter where the viewer is.

The school pays; families do not. AuthExit is an annual per-school subscription, billed once a year rather than per student, per pickup or per family, and the parent app is free—there is no charge to a parent at any point, and no paid tier that unlocks features for them. One flat fee a year for the whole school: $300 for a community school meeting one day a week (Saturday, Sunday or a single weekday) with up to 500 students, $650 for a daily school up to 500, $950 for a daily school of 500 to 1,200. Above those sizes, send a note through the contact form and we will come back with a number. One organization running schools in several locations pays network pricing instead: a $250 base for the organization, then each campus at half its normal rate, on a single invoice, from two campuses upward—two one-day campuses is $550 a year and five is $1,000. Every module is included in every tier—there are no paid add-ons. There is no separate hardware cost either, because the platform runs on the devices you already have.

The setup itself is short. You send the student list as a spreadsheet, we load it into Master Data for you, and your Super Admin sets grade dismissal times and names your pickup lanes from the settings screen. The part worth planning for is the parents—give them about a week to sign in and add their delegates before your first live dismissal, and the first afternoon goes far more smoothly.

The student list is the only thing that has to move, and it moves as a spreadsheet—there is no integration to build first. Most schools export their students from the system they are leaving, send it over, and run both side by side for a few days before switching fully. Attendance history is not imported: it stays in your old system, and AuthExit begins its own audit trail on your first day of use.

By email, and by push notification on iPhone and iPad through the AuthExit app. Delegate approvals and early-pickup decisions send both, so a parent is not left refreshing a screen to find out whether the office said yes. Push is iOS only at present—Android users get the same information by email and in the app itself.

Yes. An Admin writes a short notice in settings and it appears on every parent portal for that day only—useful for a weather delay, an early close or a changed pickup point. The notice carries the date it was written for and stops showing on its own the next day, so a stale message cannot linger.

Only the portals their role opens. Everyone signs in at the same place and is shown a shortcut to each portal they are entitled to—a parent gets the Parent Portal, a teacher gets the Teacher Portal and the live dismissal dashboard, a volunteer gets the dashboard only, the front office gets the door scanner, and a Super Admin gets all of them. Anyone holding two roles gets everything those roles allow, combined. Nobody is shown a door they cannot open, so there is no need to tell staff which link to use.

No. Dismissal is the core, and the rest is switched on per school. The Library is either enabled for your school or it is not, and when it is not, nothing about it appears anywhere—no shortcut, no menu entry, nothing to explain to staff. Location checking on parent pickup requests works the same way: off unless you ask for it. Schools see only the parts they actually use.

From Access Manager in the Super Admin portal, in about a minute, without contacting us. You add the person, tick the roles they need—Volunteer, Admin, Teacher, Librarian or Super Admin—and an unused Staff ID is issued for the door scanner. Somebody who leaves is marked inactive rather than deleted, so their attendance history stays intact for reporting while their sign-in stops working straight away. Parent access is not managed here at all: it follows the parent email addresses on each student record, so a parent gains and loses access along with their child’s enrollment.

No, and it is not trying to be. A school management system or student information system—PowerSchool, Blackbaud, Gradelink and the like—holds grades, transcripts, timetables, course registration and state reporting. AuthExit does none of that. What it does is the part those systems handle poorly or not at all: getting several hundred children out of the building safely, and proving afterwards who collected whom and when. It runs alongside your SIS rather than replacing it. The only thing that moves between them is the student list, and that arrives as a spreadsheet.

Car line, and the carpool part of dismissal—but not carpool matching. AuthExit runs the pickup queue: a parent requests from the car, the child joins a live queue, and staff release them at the door against a scan. Where several children leave with one driver, whether siblings or an agreed carpool, one request brings them together and the driver collects them in one stop. What it does not do is introduce families to each other or build ride-share rotas; if you want a service that matches parents into carpools, that is a different kind of product.

Yes. Arrivals and departures are both recorded at the door, time-stamped, and exportable to Excel for any day or date range—which is what a paper sign-in sheet is usually there to provide, without the clipboard or the handwriting. Late arrivals and early departures are recorded the same way as ordinary ones, so the day reconciles without anybody reconstructing it afterwards.

Yes. A parent nominates another registered parent or a trusted guardian from the app, and the request goes to the school’s approval queue—it becomes usable once a Super Admin approves it, not before. Once approved, the system groups siblings and carpool members so one request brings them to the same place.

A parent nominates the delegate—a grandparent, sitter or another family—from their profile. The request goes to the school’s approval queue, and nothing is active until a Super Admin approves it. Both the parent and the delegate are notified by email and push on the decision, and a parent can deactivate or remove a delegate at any time without asking the office.

Parents raise an early-pickup request from their portal and it arrives in the same approval queue the office already watches. Once approved, the student appears in the dismissal queue at the agreed time and exits through the same scan-verified handoff as a normal pickup, so the audit trail is identical.

From inside the platform. A Super Admin generates cards for the entire roster as a single print-ready PDF, complete with each student’s QR code—no card printer or design software required. You choose portrait or landscape and one- or two-sided, and you can put your own school logo, name and address on the card. The PDF is password-protected before it is emailed.

It moves the queue off the pavement and onto a screen. A parent taps to request pickup from the car, the child joins a live queue that the office and the classrooms can all see, and staff bring the student to the door while the car is still moving up the line—rather than a radio call and a wait once it arrives. Schools with more than one pickup point can run named lanes, so the queue is split the way the car park actually works.

Yes. You name each lane the way your car park actually works—front gate, side lot, bus loop—and a parent picks the lane they are in when they request pickup. They can switch lanes afterwards if they end up somewhere else. The live dashboard groups the queue by lane, and where siblings are being collected at different lanes it flags them, so nobody walks a child to the wrong door.

That is your choice, per school. Location checking is off unless you turn it on. With it on, the request button only becomes active once the parent is physically within a set distance of the campus—500 meters by default—so pickups cannot be fired off from home half an hour early. Schools that would rather let parents queue in advance simply leave it off.

The office can raise the pickup for them. Staff with Admin rights can put a student into the dismissal queue from the admin portal, so a parent who turns up without the app—or without a phone at all—is handled at the door exactly like everyone else, with the same verified exit and the same record. Nobody is turned away for not having a device.

It is how classroom attendance is taken, on a tablet or phone. A teacher picks their grade, slides once to mark the whole room present, then corrects only the exceptions—present and absent counts update as they go. They can search the roster by student name or ID, and they can see which of their students are already in the afternoon pickup queue without leaving the screen.

Yes, through the same door scanner. Staff badges carry a longer ID than student cards, so the scanner can tell which it is reading and records it accordingly—one scan per person per day, with no check-out step to remember. Staff attendance has its own tab in reporting, kept separate from the student figures.

Yes. You enroll a title once and it gets its own ID and printable QR label. From there, checkout, return and renewal are all a scan. Students and parents get a searchable discovery catalog where they can place a hold, staff get inventory and label printing, circulation reports and analytics, and every event—every loan, return, renewal and hold—is kept in a full activity history. There is also a reading log for recording daily reading minutes, and books can carry Lexile levels so students find something at the right level.

Access follows the role. Librarians and Super Admins get the full set—enrolling books, checkout, inventory and reports. Students and parents see the discovery catalog and the reading log, and parents additionally get a request queue for their pickups and holds. The library only appears at all for schools that have the module enabled, so it stays out of the way if you do not use it.

Yes. Super Admins can pull attendance for a single day or across a date range and export it to Excel, or have the report emailed as an attachment. Because entries, exits, parent requests and scans are all time-stamped, questions like “who collected this student on Tuesday and at what time” are a lookup rather than a phone call. A live telemetry view shows what is happening while dismissal is actually running.

We use enterprise-grade encryption for all data in transit and at rest. We do not share or sell any data. Our platform is compliant with standard student privacy regulations, ensuring that sensitive information remains protected.

Only the people whose role requires it, and only for your own school. Access is scoped by role: a volunteer helping with dismissal reaches the pickup queue and nothing else, a teacher reaches their classroom, and the front office and Super Admins reach the directory and reporting. Every request is checked twice on the server—once that the person is signed in, and once that the school being asked about is the school they belong to. A Super Admin at one school cannot read another school’s roster by editing the address bar.