Accurate attendance tracking ensures your business runs smoothly and without delays. Employee attendance trackers can also help you reduce absenteeism, which has been shown to lead to productivity losses that cost U.S. businesses $225.8 billion every year.
The easiest way to start tracking employee attendance is to choose one of the employee attendance tracker Excel templates available online for free.
We’ve looked through all the popular Excel template websites and found the best attendance tracker templates out there.
Before we tell you what these are, let’s make sure we’re on the same page when it comes to the importance of attendance tracking.
There are three main reasons why your business needs to track employee attendance:
Businesses need to keep track of attendance to make sure they comply with regulations.
In the U.S, the Fair Labor Standards Act states that employers are required to keep track of how many hours their employees work, as well as how much they’re paid for their work.
Similarly, the European Working Time Directive stipulates that all employers must track their employees’ attendance and time worked.
This is to ensure that businesses can comply with the European Union’s regulations surrounding work breaks and the maximum limit of weekly work hours.
Attendance tracking allows employers to identify various attendance issues, monitor planned and unplanned absences, and enforce attendance policies.
Through attendance tracking, businesses are able to analyze arrival, leave, and break times to ensure work times aren’t being abused.
It allows you to have a better understanding of which employees are always on time, which tend to be late, and those who might sometimes miss their shifts.
By tracking attendance, you’ll be able to create more efficient schedules. This will ensure that team members don’t end up being underutilized or overworked.
As a result, you’ll improve productivity and keep your team happy.
By tracking attendance, you’ll have accurate time records and make sure you’re paying your employees for their work fairly. It will help prevent time theft and ensure that you’re only paying for time worked.
Attendance tracking is also essential for properly calculating overtime pay, which is crucial if you want your business to stay out of legal trouble.
While you can customize your employee attendance spreadsheet to suit your company’s needs, almost all attendance templates should contain the following information:
Employee’s name and contact information
Attendance status
Clock in and clock out times
Total work hours
Total break time
We’ve gathered the top five employee attendance tracker Excel templates available online.
Note that some of these can also be used as a meeting attendance template, a training attendance template, or an employee absence tracker.
Look through these, and you’re bound to find one that’ll be perfect for your needs.
This simple attendance tracker template from Office.com consists of four sheets: one for each quarter, plus a year-to-date summary.
The summary sheet contains fields for employees’ personal and work details, such as their first and last name, their Social Security number, position, hire date, and the name of their supervisor.
Then, it has separate columns for vacation days, personal days, and sick days.
It also allows you to track the total and remaining vacation days for each individual employee.
The Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 sheets feature separate columns for each day of the year, allowing you to quickly note whether an employee was present, absent, sick, or on vacation on a particular day.
This template includes five sheets:
A calendar view
An employee leave tracker
An employee list
Leave types
Company holidays
To use it, start by adding all your employees to the list of employees sheet. Then, visit the leave types sheet to add all the leave types allowed or recorded by your company.
The default ones include “sick leave,” “vacation,” “bereavement,” and “other.”
Finally, add your company’s paid holidays to the company holidays sheet.
Default holidays include New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
You can then use the calendar view to record attendance. This particular template uses color-coding to record attendance. Regular employee attendance, sick days, and vacation all having their own separate colors.
Once you fill out the attendance sheet for an employee, the calendar view will also provide you with the total number of working days, sick days, and vacation days they have.
You can also use this template to record employee leave in the dedicated sheet for leave tracking. In this sheet, you’ll be able to add the employee’s name, start and end dates for their leave, and the type of leave.
The sheet will then automatically calculate the employee’s total leave days.
ExcelTemplate.net’s employee attendance tracker template gives you a quick and easy way to track and manage employee attendance and time off.
It consists of twelve sheets: one for each month of the year.
To start using this attendance tracker, go to the current month and add in all your employees’ names in the Employee Name column.
Review the leave type categories and then change or add new ones as necessary. The default options are “Vacation,” “Personal,” and “Sick.”
You can also use this section to add in company holidays.
Once you do that, you’re ready to start recording attendance by going to the current month’s sheet and marking attendance for each individual employee.
This template from ExcelHub.org comes with only one sheet.
It’s designed to hold attendance information for each month on a separate sheet, so you’ll need to create a new sheet at the start of each month.
To start using this template, add all your employees to the Employee Name column, then customize the leave types in the dedicated leave section.
After that, you’re free to start tracking attendance in that sheet by using the provided abbreviations for each attendance status.
Once the month is over, simply duplicate the existing sheet, change the month in the first column, and start tracking attendance for the next month.
SmartSheet’s employee attendance tracker is among the easiest ones to use on this list.
Start by adding in your employees’ names, then review and modify the legend section to suit your needs.
The default attendance status options are “Work Shift,” “Vacation,” “Personal,” and “Sick.”
Once you do that, you can track attendance by adding the appropriate abbreviation to each employees’ daily attendance column.
After the month is over, simply duplicate the sheet to start tracking attendance for the next month.
LeaveBoard’s attendance tracking template consists of 14 sheets: a Totals sheet, an Employees sheet, and one sheet for every month of the year.
To start using this template, go to the Employees sheet and add all your employees.
Then, go to the sheet for the current month and select an employee for each row.
Now, you’re ready to start tracking attendance.
The sheet will automatically calculate the total number of working days, leaves, and absences for each employee.
If you want to see the totals for the entire year, simply go to the dedicated Totals sheet.
The last template on our list is quite simple to use. It consists of only one sheet. To get started using it, add all your employees’ names in the appropriate row. Then, review the leave type labels and make any necessary modifications.
Finally, change the month and year to reflect the current date.
Then, simply use the provided labels to mark the employee attendance status for your team each day.
Once the month is over, duplicate the sheet and use the new one to track attendance for the next month.
While spreadsheets can be a quick and easy way to get started with attendance tracking, they also come with a few drawbacks.
Updating an attendance tracking spreadsheet every day can be very time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of employees.
This is time that you or your team could be spending on tasks that are more important to the growth of the business.
When you track employee attendance manually, it’s easy to make a mistake. All it takes is for you to be a bit more tired than usual or pay a little less attention than you usually do.
With attendance tracking, these mistakes can end up being costly and result in loss of trust or even lawsuits.
Manual attendance tracking also opens up the possibility of time theft through buddy punching and other means.
The best way to avoid this is to use automated attendance tracking software like Hubstaff.
Businesses have access to a variety of attendance tracking solutions today. These tools can help you automate attendance tracking, which, in turn, allows you to:
Ensure accurate records – Automated attendance tracking systems eliminate the possibility of human error and ensure accurate attendance records. These solutions track attendance in real-time and provide you with accurate attendance reports you can use to identify and deal with attendance issues.
They also allow you to store all your attendance records digitally, reducing waste and minimizing paperwork.
Reduce costs – By improving accuracy, attendance tracking software helps you reduce costs by minimizing payroll errors and fraud. It also allows you to improve your team’s efficiency through optimized schedules, driving costs down even further.
Save time – Implementing an automated attendance tracking system saves time for your team. Employees don’t have to worry about clocking in and out or filling out timesheets, and your HR team doesn’t have to waste time on so much paperwork.
Keep your data safe – You have an obligation to keep your employees’ attendance data safe. Attendance tracking software allows you to store attendance records in the cloud safely. This helps to protect both your business’ data and your employees’ information.
Simplify payroll – Using software to automate attendance tracking will help you track both time and attendance accurately. This, in turn, will enable you to pay your team for their time fairly. You’ll also be able to keep track of overtime and calculate overtime pay correctly, which can save you a lot of money in the long run.
If you’re using a tool like Hubstaff, you’ll also be able to completely automate payroll through integrations with payment services such as PayPal, Payoneer, Wise, and Bitwage.
Ready to automate attendance tracking using software? Here’s what to look for.
Ease of use – Your attendance tracking software should be easy for your team to use. Complicated tools with too many features you don’t need will only waste your team’s time.
Features – Think hard about which features you really need in an attendance tracking solution. Some features most businesses would benefit from include the ability to set up multiple shifts, group-based attendance and time tracking rules, alerts for missed or late shifts, and payroll management.
Integrations – Finally, your attendance tracking solution should play well with all the other tools you already use, such as your HR management and accounting software.
Hubstaff is a time tracking and workforce management tool that can help you track working time, automate attendance tracking, measure productivity, streamline payroll, and more.
Here’s how you can get started with Hubstaff.
Hubstaff gives you 14 days to test it out and see if it’s the right fit for your team’s needs, completely free of charge. Get started by creating an account here.
The next step is to invite your team and get them to download the Hubstaff app. It’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android devices, which ensures your team members will be able to use it regardless of which type of device they own.
Once you’ve created a Hubstaff account, you can create a schedule by clicking on Schedules in the left-hand sidebar and then on the Add schedule button.
In the dialog box that opens up, choose the team member, the shift duration, and minimum hours.
You can also make it a weekly or bi-weekly recurring shift and choose which days you want the shift to occur.
If you make a mistake or need to remove a shift, you can delete the shift by clicking on it and then on the Delete button.
Once you add shifts for all your employees, you’ll be able to view the entire schedule at a glance on the Schedules screen.
Hubstaff allows you to completely automate attendance tracking when your team members arrive at or leave a work site. Here’s how to do it.
Hubstaff uses geofencing technology to automate the process of clocking employees in and out. To start using it, go to Locations > Job sites and click the Add a Job site button.
Next, type in a name for the Job site, add the site’s physical address, choose a radius, and click on Next.
On the next screen, add team members that will be able to track time on this Job site, and choose whether you want time tracking to start and stop automatically when team members enter or leave the Job site.
Alternatively, you can choose to send automatic reminders to team members to remind them to start or stop tracking their time.
Hubstaff gives you the option of getting automated alerts for late, missed, and abandoned shifts. Here’s how these work:
Late shifts – If an employee doesn’t start tracking their time within the first five minutes of when their shift is scheduled to start, you’ll get a notification telling you that they’re late to their shift.
Missed shifts – When an employee doesn’t track any time during their shift, the software will count that as a missed shift, and you’ll get a notification about it once the shift ends.
Abandoned shifts – If an employee tracks time during their shift but doesn’t meet the minimum hour requirement you’ve set, you’ll get a notification about an abandoned shift.
All of this data is securely stored in your Hubstaff account, which is much more accurate and secure than an employee attendance spreadsheet. Start a free trial today and see how easy it is to automate your attendance record.
Track time and attendance for your team, measure productivity and make payroll easier.