Employee Attendance Tracker: What It Is & Why You Need One [+ Free Template]
Charlette has over 10 years of experience in accounting and finance and 2 years of partnering with HR leaders on freelance projects. She uses this extensive experience to answer your questions about payroll.
This article is part of a larger series on Time & Attendance.
An employee attendance tracker is a way for you to track your employee’s attendance, tardiness, absenteeism, and time off—and it will go hand in hand with your employee attendance policy. Often set up like an employee attendance calendar, your tracker can come in many forms, some better than others. Use our free attendance tracker so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Download Attendance Tracker Template
If you want an easy and efficient way to track your employee attendance, try one of our recommended time and attendance software. These systems make it easy for you to enter your policies and track your employees’ attendance and time off, helping to ensure accurate payroll and operational management. Cutting down on absenteeism and tardiness will help improve your company’s morale and productivity.
Employee Attendance Tracker Template
If you choose to track attendance manually, then we recommend you use a template—like the one we offer—that records attendance for each pay period. Aligning your attendance tracker with your payroll will allow you to better compile and review necessary data.
To be clear, an employee attendance tracker is not a time sheet. On a time sheet, you are recording hours worked so that you know what to pay your employees. Conversely, an employee attendance tracker—which goes with your employee attendance policy—shows you statistics about an employee, like how much time they have taken off, how many days they have been late, and more.
Download Attendance Tracker Template
How to Use Our Free Employee Attendance Tracker
Our free employee attendance tracker template simplifies your life by providing you with just the relevant information and nothing more. It requires manual entry on your part to input the data, but it will give you results showing each employee’s attendance history.
We’ve set it up as a two-week view to align with companies that run payroll every two weeks. Keeping this data aligned with payroll data makes it easy for you to enter the info along with payroll information so that you can keep everything updated. We have started the template with four payroll periods for your convenience. You are free to change the template to fit your needs.
Step 1: Fill in the Brackets
Your first step when using our template is to fill in the necessary information within the brackets. This includes the employee’s name and the date of each day being tracked. You can duplicate tabs at the bottom for each of your employees.
Step 2: Enter Data
Then, you will need to manually select from each of the drop-down fields whether an employee met a certain condition on each day. For each of these fields, you will select “Yes” if the employee met the condition. If an employee did not meet the condition, then you can either select “No” or leave that field blank.
Late Arrival
For each day in the pay period, select “Yes” if the employee was late to work. If they were on time, you can leave the field blank.
Early Departure
If an employee left work early without giving notice or receiving prior approval, select “Yes” in the drop-down on the date the employee left early. Make sure you are only marking an employee as “Yes” if they have left early in violation of your company’s attendance policy.
Paid Time Off
When an employee takes paid time off (PTO), mark that day as “Yes.” While recording your team’s PTO and vacation days should not be a penalty against them, it does help you see how frequently an employee is out.
Sick Days
If an employee calls their manager or supervisor to let them know they are sick and cannot come to work, mark that day as “Yes” in the appropriate drop-down. Recording sick days is important so you can accurately track how often an employee calls out.
No Call, No Show
Sometimes employees do not show up to work and don’t call out. When this happens, mark the appropriate day as “Yes” to record them as a no call, no show. This information is vital if you need to reprimand or terminate an employee for excessive absenteeism.
Totals
For each column, the totals will automatically be calculated. The totals for “Late Arrival,” “Early Departure,” and “No Call, No Show” are triggered to shade the total box red if there are too many “Yes” selections. You can change the number that triggers a red color by right clicking on the field and selecting “Conditional Formatting” to change the value.
Ultimately, this sheet gives you a quick snapshot of your team’s attendance and whether you need to take action and discuss concerns with any particular team member. Modifying this sheet to fit your needs will help you keep track of whether you have any attendance problems with employees.
Why You Need an Employee Attendance Tracker
Employee tardiness, sick day call outs, and no call, no shows cause problems for businesses. When an employee misses a day or is late for work, that has ripple effects that can affect not only business productivity but also employee morale. If other employees see one employee show up late consistently and not suffer any consequences, then other employees may start acting the same way and not care as much about their work.
It is in your best interest to proactively track employee attendance so that you can take swift action to counteract potential drops in employee engagement.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the 2020 absenteeism rate was 3%. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that chronic health conditions alone cost employers over $35 billion per year because employees miss days at work unexpectedly. This doesn’t even account for employees who overslept, missed the train, or got stuck in traffic.
This data makes clear that employee attendance issues could affect your business. If you don’t track the issues, you’ll never know you have a problem.
How Employee Attendance Tracking Software Makes It Easy
We’ve designed our template to be easy for you to use and simple for you to review. We did not want to overcomplicate the sheet and require too much data entry from you. But, while that will give you the basics of what you need, there are better options in the form of employee attendance software.
The right software will give you additional data, as much or as little as you want. It will also remove the manual process of updating the data, saving you significant time.
Attendance tracking software is the most efficient way to track your employees’ attendance. With it, you can:
- Let employees punch in and out electronically
- Use verification methods for employee punches (like GPS restriction)
- Approve PTO requests electronically and at your leisure
- Run reports to see employee attendance issues
The best part of using employee attendance tracking software is that it helps you streamline your processes. Employee attendance tracking software combines time sheets and attendance tracking, giving you a one-stop-shop for all of your payroll and attendance related data.
Bottom Line
Employee attendance tracking gives you vital information about the way your business is operating. It makes it easy to keep track of the days each employee comes to work—and when they don’t.
