Big or small, every company needs employees to ‘show up’ for a seamless flow of work. Lack of punctuality can lead to performance issues and productivity lags, and no one wants that. Not just that, without a clear attendance record, it may be very challenging for HR & accounts departments to calculate salaries, overtime, and deductions correctly at the end of every month.
Luckily, we offer a preprogrammed Monthly Attendance Template that allows you to create formal attendance records, analyze attendance patterns by month, year, employee, or department, identify employees with the most leaves, and much more.
What We Offer
Our free, smart, and advanced sheet is designed to facilitate the work of HR professionals, general managers, and shift supervisors to manage employee attendance. Especially for startups, or companies with a lot of employees, and even for smaller establishments managing dozens of shift workers with separate work schedules.
Feel free to embed this template into your HR system or use it standalone – either way, we save you hours in research, designing, and programming!
We offer you:
- A quick snapshot of your attendance data by month, year, department, and employee
- An attendance log you can tailor to your organizational needs
- Automated functionalities & protected formulae to save you time & trouble – that’s right, we do the math for you!
- Graphical and list-view representations of attendance and leave data to help visualize large employee datasets
Why You Need A Monthly Attendance Sheet!
Whether you manage HR for a multinational or run a small business of your own, you need attendance sheets to:
- Track and monitor the attendance record of each employee
- Calculate salaries and salary deductions accurately
- Monitor & respond to patterns like frequent absences or misuse of leave balance
- Ensure compliance with relevant labor laws
- Plan and schedule work more efficiently
- Distribute workload better to ensure continuity of normal business activities
What’s Inside?
Once you download the file on your PC, turn on macros to take full advantage of the automated features we’ve added. Here’s how:
- Step 1: Download the file
- Step 2: Right-click on the file icon
- Step 3: Go to ‘Properties’
- Step 4: Select the option ‘Unblock’ under ‘Security’
Open the file in Excel to find 4 sheets inside:
- An Overall Dashboard
- An Employee Data Sheet
- Attendance Sheet
- A Configuration Sheet
We explain each sheet in detail below!
Reset All Data
Start by opening the Config Sheet and clicking the ‘Reset All Data’ button. This will clear the sample data we’ve provided for testing, giving you a clean slate to begin entering your own data.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of datasets you’ll be working with: Employee Data and Attendance Data.
But before we get to these,…
Tailor This Template For YOU!
When it comes to finding the right attendance tracking templates, customization is key! Depending on the number of employees or the kind of workflow you have, customize the template to your individual needs & requirements.
To get started, open the Config sheet and do this:
Set the attendance year
A built-in calendar allows you to easily register & track attendance without having to manually enter each date. All you need to do is identify the Active Year, and our attendance sheet/dashboard will automatically update itself.
Our standard settings allow you to track and manage attendance for any year up to 2032. If needed, you can expand this range using the Config sheet provided.
Define monthly leave limits
Leave policies vary from company to company. Tailor the template to your organizational context, and be sure to specify the maximum number of formal or official leaves an employee is allowed per month at your company.
WARNING! If the set limit is exceeded by the employee within each month, it will be flagged red, indicating the employee has reached the leave limit for that month.
Be aware that the limit you define only covers pre-approved, that is, sick leaves, personal leaves, and vacation leaves. Other absences from work (such as public holidays or No Show, No Call cases) are not considered in this limit.
Choose your weekend policy
There is no single standard for weekend policies across businesses. For example, most companies in the U.S. follow a Saturday–Sunday weekend, while many Middle Eastern firms use Friday–Saturday, and retail or hospitality businesses may have no fixed weekends at all.
Note that weekends are not part of our calculations for the attendance record and Total Present Days. By default, Saturday and Sunday are non-working days, but you can adjust these settings in the Config Sheet to match your company policy.
You can also not have any weekends at all. Either way, changes you make in the Config sheet are automatically reflected across the attendance sheet and the dashboard.
Welcome to the Dashboard: Your Ultimate HR Portal
Welcome to your live, interactive, and user-friendly Dashboard!
The dashboard gives you access to your company’s attendance data in one place! Dynamically connected to your main databases, this is where you get to visualize attendance data & track useful trends for various organizational purposes, such as:
Tracking overall attendance by month
The first visual aid, a simple pie chart, shows the attendance and non-attendance levels of all employees for a given month.
Non-attendance is categorized by type of leave: Sick, Paid, Vacation, or Holiday (more on our default leave categories below!).
Tracking attendance by department
This line chart provides a quick and easy overview of attendance levels across departments in your company. For general managers, CEOs, and HR specialists, this information is crucial for enforcing standards of punctuality, accountability, and discipline across teams.
Users can track, in real time, which team or department is showing the highest or lowest attendance levels. HR can use the knowledge to recognize or reward high-attendance departments (perhaps every month or year). At the same time, it can be used to engage with employees (or even teams) showing lower attendance, giving them reminders and incentives to step up their attendance game!
Tracking and monitoring the highest leave-takers
A vital part of every HR manager’s job is keeping an eye on attendance records and flagging patterns that may lead to performance issues. Given the criticality of work schedules and the need for employees to ‘show up’ and work their set hours, we help you visualize this information in an easy, graphical form.
Only the names & IDs of employees reporting the relatively highest leave count will show up here. For each employee, the leave count is sorted by categories defined for you. You can take information from this chart to take appropriate action to remind and warn frequent leave takers of the consequences of their actions, as per company policy.
To learn more about the legal classification of work leaves in the U.S., search for our comprehensive blog post on the subject right here!
What’s Next?
The next two bar graphs present the crux of all data you enter in the worksheets. By compiling and turning this data into visuals, you can capture leave trends per month and per employee. This ensures proper tracking for HR and other legal, tax, audit, or recording purposes.
Per month, all employees’ attendance
This chart gives you a monthly breakdown of attendance for all employees.
When analyzed for the whole year or compared for different ones, this knowledge can help you identify leave trends, so you can make more informed decisions about human resource management (See HR Guide for Leave Takers below).
Per employee monthly attendance
When it comes to HR tracking, this is likely the visual you’ll rely on the most. Whether it’s calculating payroll taxes, disciplining employees for poor attendance, or monitoring leave balances, you need the complete attendance & leave records of all employees available to you in an easily digestible format.
For each employee, attending and non-attending days are shown as vertical bars. Sorting leaves by type allows for a detailed record & assessment of each employee’s attendance record & performance. Below, I compiled a list of common self-reflections to guide office managers and HR professionals in their work!
HR Guide for Leave Takers
- Based on Dashboard data, how regular are employees at work overall?
- How many unplanned absences do they take in a month or year?
- Are there recurring patterns (e.g., frequent absences on Mondays or Fridays)?
- Do certain teams or departments have higher absence rates than others?
- How often do they use different types of leave (sick, casual, unpaid, etc.)?
- Is absenteeism affecting work or team productivity?
- Are there seasonal trends in absenteeism that HR should know about, and prepare for?
- Do certain employees require follow-ups or counseling for repeated absences?
Employee Data Sheet
For obvious reasons, data about employees must be entered before you start adding attendance entries for them. For each employee, you must enter the following:
- Employee ID: A unique number usually assigned at the time of joining, e.g., E10001, E1002, and so on.
- Name: Enter employee’s full legal name, as it appears on official government ID, such as a passport or driver’s license.
- Position: The professional role or designation they will be serving the company in, say, Designer, Writer, Manager, etc.
- Department: Specify which team, division or department the employee shall be associated with.
- Work Location: Specify if the employee is designated to work on or off-site.
- Joining Date: When did the employee officially join the company? (usually stipulated in the Employment Contract).
The data you enter here is usually collected during onboarding. You can always use our Employee Information Form to record basic employee info, such as contact details, past health conditions, job specifics, as well as their educational and professional histories.
What about employees who are no longer working with you?
When employees quit or are fired, you must promptly jot down the termination date (Column H). This ensures that their employment status is reflected in the main Dashboard.
In other words, if an end date is entered, the employee will no longer be shown in the attendance sheet from that date.
Attendance Data Sheet
In the Attendance Sheet, information must be added or updated in real-time for each working day of the month. Only authorized HR managers or assistants (or, in the case of leave approvals, CEOs and managers) should have access to this database, who must do so diligently and promptly every day.
Attendance status
To help you easily track the attendance status of each employee, we created a simple but effective system of alphabet codes to organize information.
Here are the keys. If the employee is:
- Attending: (A) Green
- On sick leave: (S) Yellow
- On personal leave: (P) Red
- On vacation leave: (V) Purple
- Is off on account of a Public Holiday: (P)
- A No Show, No Call: (N)
You can use the Configuration Sheet to assign different letters (or a combination of letters) for each leave type. After entering attendance for an employee, click the Save Attendance button. This will instantly update the dashboard with the latest attendance data.
How to Register Attendance
In the Attendance Sheet, each employee gets their own row. Key employee data (such as their position or department) is also pulled in from the Employee Data Sheet to make it easier for you to manage and monitor workflows.
In each cell in the calendar range, there are built-in drop-down menus to help you register the Attendance Status for each working day. At the end of the month, we auto-calculate the total number of working days in a month (Total Present Days) right next to the total number of days the employee attended work. This quickly gives you a punctuality measure for each employee for that month. Moreover, each monthly sheet is print-friendly. Once an attendance month is complete, you can export the sheet to PDF or print it for the record.
To load the attendance records for previous months, simply select the month from the dropdown.
Who Should Use This Template?
Our template is a quick, useful, and handy resource for:
- HR Managers and Payroll Teams – to track attendance, leaves, and calculate salaries
- Team Leads and Supervisors – to monitor staff availability and plan shifts
- Small Business Owners – to maintain clear attendance records without the need for a dedicated HR department
- Schools & Universities – to track student or staff attendance
