Employee attendance sheet: what it is, who fills it in and how
The employee attendance sheet is the document where a company records, day by day, the hours worked and the absences of each employee. At the end of the month it becomes the summary that whoever processes payroll starts from. It can be an Excel sheet, a paper form or a piece of software.
What it is for
The attendance sheet answers three questions: who worked, how many hours, and why someone was absent. It helps you pass tidy data to the labour consultant, keep track of holidays and leave, and avoid disputes at the end of the month.
For the legal obligations that apply to your company, ask your payroll or employment adviser.
Who has to fill it in
It depends on how the company is organised. In small businesses it is often kept by a manager or by the administration team. In others each person records their own hours and a manager checks them. What matters is deciding who writes, who checks and who passes the data to whoever runs payroll, and always following the same routine.
How to fill it in
- Prepare the month: one row per employee, one column for each day.
- Mark every day: the hours worked or the type of absence.
- Use fixed codes for absences, for example H for holiday, S for sick leave and L for other leave.
- Note overtime so that it stands out from normal hours.
- Close the month: check the totals and send the sheet to whoever processes payroll, by an internal deadline.
What to do for part-time staff
A part-timer has different contractual hours from a full-timer: record the expected daily hours for each person, otherwise the comparison between hours worked and hours due will not add up. Our template has a dedicated column for this.
Excel or software?
An Excel sheet is enough when there are few people and a single person looks after it. It starts to weigh on you when you have to chase files, fix formulas and copy everything over again at the end of the month.
You can start from the attendance sheet template in Excel and PDF, free and with no sign-up. If you also need to know which jobs the hours went to, read the guide to the timesheet.
When the file is no longer enough, the attendance sheet in Klokka is built from the hours recorded during the month and is ready to export to CSV, Excel or PDF.
Alex