One card: identity, attendance, sign-in

The reader is a purpose-built gate device designed around Ethiopian infrastructure: it runs on mobile data with a battery backup, so a power cut or a dead Wi-Fi router does not open a hole in the attendance record. Taps are stored on the device when the network drops and forwarded when it returns, on the same offline-first rule as the rest of the platform.

Cards are contactless smart cards printed with the school's name, colors and the student's photo, tied to the student's permanent Temari ID. There is no per-tap fee and no consumable to keep buying: once a card is issued, it works for that student's entire time at the school.

Every branch's first reader is included at no cost, because the point of the system is the record, not hardware revenue. Schools with multiple gates or larger campuses add readers as needed; a typical single-gate primary school never needs more than the free one.

A morning tap writes an arrival record with the exact time, visible immediately to the school and to the family portal. A parent who checks their phone at 8:00 sees "at school since 07:52". An afternoon tap-out, where the school uses it, closes the day the same way.

The reader and the homeroom register are two layers of one system, and the order between them is fixed. The reader fills the register as students walk in, and the homeroom teacher has the last word on it. If a student's card fails, is forgotten, or records a wrong tap, the teacher's manual mark overrides it every time. Schools get the labor saving of automation without surrendering judgment to it.

Students who have not tapped in by the school's cut-off time trigger the same-day absence SMS to their guardian, which turns the gate from a formality into the earliest possible warning that a child who left home did not arrive.

The same card is the student's key to the digital side of school. It prints the student's Temari ID, so a child without their own phone borrows any phone (a parent's, a sibling's, a school tablet), types the ID and their PIN, and is in their own account with their own homework and results. They need no email address or phone number of their own, and nobody shares a password.

Employee cards work identically on the same readers, feeding employee attendance into HR and payroll without a separate fingerprint machine, a second register, or double entry. One gate, one stream of records, two audiences.

Lost cards stop being a security question the moment they are reported: the card is switched off at once, its QR stops working, and the replacement carries the same identity and history. Replacing the plastic never touches the record underneath it.