Free Employee Attendance Sheet Template: Monthly Tracker With Attendance Codes, Automatic Totals and a Daily Sign-In Sheet

What the Attendance Sheet Includes

• Monthly Attendance tab: one row per employee with name, ID and department, and one column for every day of the month. Day numbers and weekday labels update automatically from the month you enter, and months shorter than 31 days blank out the extra columns.
• Drop-down attendance codes in every day cell, so entries stay consistent.
• Automatic totals per employee for each code, scheduled days, and an attendance percentage.
• Color highlighting: absences in red, late arrivals in amber, protected leave in blue, weekends and holidays in grey.
• Daily Sign-In tab: a printable sheet with employee name, time in, time out, unpaid break, calculated hours and signature, for sites that sign in on paper or at a kiosk.
• How to Use tab with instructions and record-keeping notes.

For tracking hours and overtime for pay rather than attendance, use our timesheet template; for the rules employees are measured against, see our attendance policy template.

Attendance Codes

The codes can be edited in the drop-down list (Data > Data validation) to match your policy, for example to add a code for remote work or for a floating holiday. Keep protected leave separate from other absences: an attendance record that counts jury duty or military leave as an absence is a liability.

How to Use the Template

1. Download and save a master copy. Make one copy per month, or duplicate the tab for each month in a single workbook.
2. Enter the first day of the month in cell C2, plus the department and manager.
3. List employees in column A with their ID and department. The sheet has 25 rows; insert more above row 30 to extend the formulas.
4. Mark weekends and holidays first, then record attendance each day using the drop-down.
5. Review the totals at the end of the row and the highlighted cells for patterns.
6. Sign and file at month end. Keep the sheet with the related timesheets.

For Google Sheets, upload the .xlsx to Drive and open it with Sheets; the drop-downs, conditional colors and formulas carry over.

How to Calculate Attendance Rate

The template calculates attendance per employee as:

Attendance % = (days present + days late + 0.5 × half days) / scheduled days

Scheduled days are all days the employee was expected to work, including days taken as sick, vacation or protected leave, but excluding weekends, scheduled days off and company holidays. An employee scheduled for 22 days who was present 19, late 1, sick 1 and on vacation 1 has an attendance rate of (19 + 1) / 22 = 90.9%.

The organization-level absenteeism rate is usually calculated the other way, counting only unplanned absence: unplanned days absent / (average headcount × working days) × 100. Planned vacation is normally excluded so that employees are not penalized in the metric for using leave they earned. Our guides to absenteeism and HR metrics cover both.

What an Attendance Record Should Contain

• Employee name and identifier, department and manager.
• Each scheduled day and the outcome, using consistent codes.
• Arrival time for late arrivals and the reason where known.
• Leave type for every absence, with protected leave marked separately.
• Supporting documents referenced, such as a medical note or jury summons, stored securely elsewhere.
• Manager sign-off at period end.

Attendance records used for pay are time records under the Fair Labor Standards Act and should be kept for at least two years; payroll records for three. Medical details belong in a confidential file, not on the attendance sheet. Our guide to tracking employee attendance compares methods from paper to biometric clocks.

Reading the Patterns in an Attendance Sheet

An attendance sheet is most useful when it is read across rows and down columns, not cell by cell. Three patterns are worth looking for each month.

• Clusters around weekends and holidays. Sick days that repeatedly fall on Mondays, Fridays or the day after a holiday are the classic sign of unplanned absence being used as extra leave. One occurrence means nothing; the same pattern over three months is a conversation. Our guide to absence patterns covers how to raise it fairly.
• Rising lateness. A run of late codes for an employee who was previously punctual often signals a change outside work, such as childcare, transport or health, and is better met with a schedule conversation than a warning. See addressing tardiness.
• Team-wide dips. A column with several absences on the same day, or a team whose attendance rate falls over a quarter, points to a workload, morale or scheduling problem rather than an individual one.

Whatever the pattern, compare like with like: the same employee over time, or employees on the same schedule, and always exclude protected leave before drawing conclusions. If your policy uses points, our guide to the attendance point system explains how to translate the codes into points without counting protected absence.

Attendance Sheet vs Timesheet

Many teams need both: the attendance sheet for absence and leave, the timesheet for pay. Automated time and attendance systems produce both from the same clock-in data.

When a Spreadsheet Stops Being Enough

An attendance sheet is a record of what a manager typed into it. That works for a small team in one place where the manager sees everyone arrive. It breaks down in predictable ways: entries made from memory at the end of the week, late arrivals that nobody recorded, remote and hybrid staff whose start time is invisible, multiple sites, and the manual work of reconciling the sheet with timesheets and payroll every month.

E-Monitor's attendance tracking records clock-in, late arrival, absence and the absence reason automatically, for office, remote and field staff, with optional GPS and geofenced clock-in for job sites, and exports regular hours, overtime, PTO and absence records for payroll. The template above is the right tool until that point.

Related reading: Biweekly vs Semi-Monthly Pay, E-Monitor + Google Workspace.

Frequently Asked Questions