Attendance Sheet in Excel – Step Wise Guide to Make One

How do you record and manage attendance at your workplace? Is your attendance management process efficient enough to bear fruits? Attendance management be it a school, university, or company is one of the most crucial tasks. A good attendance sheet can make things go easy.

Are you looking to make an attendance sheet in excel for your employees or students? If yes, we get it. This blog will walk you through everything you need to know about simple attendance sheets in excel from definition to types, importance, steps, and more.

Walk Through to Know More!!

What Is an Attendance Sheet?

An attendance sheet is a tool that is used to record the presence or absence of students, employees, or teachers on a daily basis. An attendance sheet is also related to the salary of the employees as it helps the management to record the presents, time-offs, late-ins, half-days, etc. This sheet is used by the managers to calculate the salaries of the employees.

Earlier books and sheets were used to track the attendance of the employees. But lately, as people started using computers and technology became an integral part of our lives, attendance tracking also began on computers.

With advancements in every field, technology today helps even in marking attendance by various methods like excel sheets and other digital tools like fingerprint attendance management systems and more. In India, 40-50% of businesses, be it small or medium, still use excel sheets to track their employees attendance. Attendance sheets are available in various types which are further discussed in the blog.

Types of Attendance Sheet

Attendance Sheet for Employee

An employee attendance sheet in excel is used to keep the record of the employee’s presence, absence, sick leaves, etc. for the purpose of salary or payroll. This sheet consists of the records of payroll heads like presence, absence, late comings, holidays, job training, and other kinds of leave-related data that are used to calculate the salary of employees.

Attendance Sheet for Students

Student attendance sheets are used by schools or universities to mark the regularity of each student in different classes.

Attendance Sheet for Timesheet

These kinds of excel sheets for timesheets are used to track the working hours of employees that are paid on an hourly basis. Timesheet attendance sheets keep track of the number of hours worked by every employee on a job.

Basically, it is a paper sheet with data arranged in tabular form. However, with digital advancements timesheets have become digital. Putting this another way, timesheets are records that are used for summarizing the working hours of each employee during a pay period. It calculates the arrival/departure time of each employee and the amount of time spent on each job.

Importance of Attendance Management System We Bet You Didn’t Know!

What Can Be Recorded in an Attendance Sheet?

For making management easy and smooth, an attendance sheet can be used to record different data like:

• Presence and absence of the students and employees
• Break time of the employees
• Sick leaves, vacations, personal leaves, paid leaves
• Academic results of the school or university students
• Student’s total marks calculated by the teachers

Benefits of Making Attendance Sheet

Making attendance sheets can be advantageous in many ways, some of which are discussed below:

• Helps calculate wages, salary, and overtime of the employees.
• You can keep a bird’s eye view of employees’ or students’ regularity.
• Attendance sheets money for SMEs or institutes not having enough funds to invest in advanced software.
• Saves time.
• These sheets help you to know the strength or availability of the employees present on a particular day to plan and manage projects efficiently.
• It helps in shift management and proper workload distribution.
• It helps to measure the efficiency of the team or an employee as an individual.
• Sheets can keep a record of multiple students or employees.
• Helps HR Managers or employers identify attendance issues in the organization.
• Maintaining attendance help the employers pay the employees on time.
• It helps to reduce absenteeism.
• Scheduling vacations becomes easy with attendance sheets.
• It enhances the punctuality of employees/students.
• Simplifies payroll preparation.
• You can manage tasks and projects efficiently with an attendance sheet.

How To Regulate Attendance Policy With Automated HRMS?

Using an Attendance Sheet – What is the Purpose?

The main purpose of making an attendance sheet in excel is to keep the track of the data related to the employees or students. Attendance sheets help to calculate and analyze the day-to-day data of a person regarding his/her leaves, salaries, or grades in case of a student.

Managers can keep a track of how many leaves they have taken, how frequently they miss the office without any notice, and other related data.

Attendance sheets made in excel can be a good fit for organizations with less number of employees. However, as and when companies grow their workforce, excel sheets become an efficient way of managing employee leaves. What is the solution?

Organizations have now started moving towards digitally-build solutions like automated attendance management software that can help you automate entire leave management and streamline the process.

Coming back to the main topic, below are the steps to make excel sheets for attendance management.

Steps to Make a Simple Attendance Sheet in Excel

Step 1: Add Sheets as per the Numbers

For a proper attendance sheet, add the number of sheets according to the number of months you want to keep track of.

Step 2: Add the Label

Add the label as “names” to write the names of the employees or students. Similarly, add other labels as per your requirements.

Step 3: Format the Dates in each Sheet

The next step is to add the dates to the sheet. For doing this, enter the date in a cell, right-click on the mouse and select “format cells”. With this, you can customize the date format by using “custom” under the number date. You can customize the date format as per your preference.

Once you are done with the formatting, select the date column and drag it through the rows to the date you want to record. You can also use the “fill weekdays” option to remove the weekends if you want to.

Step 4: Fix the Attendance Inputs

After formatting, it is important to fix the attendance input as P and A for present and absent respectively in order to use these inputs while taking attendance. To set the input, follow the below steps:

• Select a cell.
• In the ribbon, select “data” and under that “data validation”.
• You will then see the settings option, from that choose the list option and write A and P in the source column.
• Click OK to save changes.

Copy validation in every cell to insert appropriate data.

Step 5: Lock the Other Cells Except in Which Attendance has to be Filled

For locking a cell go to the cell locking option after selecting the range. Then go to the protection option and click on the locked option. This will make the entered data and the formulas safe.

Step 6: Evaluate the Date on which Employees/Students were Present

Use the formula to evaluate:

=COUNT(dates)- COUNTIF(attendance_range, “A”). This formula will mark your employees/students present until and unless their absence is already recorded in the sheet.

Step 7: Secure the Sheet

You will see a menu called “protect sheet” under the review tab, select the menu and allow all the permissions you want to. After the sheet is locked, you can make changes only in the cells having permission. You can follow these steps in all the months.

However, if you want to see all the data in one place, below are the steps:

• Take a new sheet, write the names and month names as headings.
• Use the formula VLOOKUP($A3, INDIRECT(C$2&”!$A$3:$B$12”),2,0. Use this formula in the beside cell once you have created all the required headings.
• If you want, use the sum function to find out all the present days of an individual.

Kudos!! Your simple attendance sheet in excel is ready. Now you can format or modify as per your requirements, also for calculating salaries or leaves.

Nonetheless, as we mentioned above, organizations have now started adapting digital solutions like attendance management software instead of excel sheets. As some organizations have multiple employees and multiple branches, attendance management systems are an easy alternative to managing their employees’ attendance. What is an attendance system?

We have got the answer.

Automated Attendance Management System – How is it Useful?

What Are Attendance Management Systems?

To create Excel templates without difficulty, many organizations use management software. In a workplace where individuals are pressed for time, attendance management software makes it simple to manage the workforce. This program is used by the HR department to monitor the company.

Advantages of using the Attendance Management System

• The systems developed on the web help in storing employee data sheets in a secure place.
• Increased Accuracy.
• Data Integrity is maintained.
• Improved Employee productivity.
• HRs’ work gets easy.
• Allow the employees to use the system from anywhere.
• Reduces time consumed in the manual creation of datasheets.

Why Is Making Attendance Sheets Beneficial?

Many smaller businesses decide to track employee working hours and absences using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of requests for time off for holidays, sick days, and other reasons. Clearly, this is the least expensive method of attendance management.

The fact that an attendance sheet is simple to use is its strongest feature for recording attendance. It is simpler to retrieve data when using a spreadsheet-based employee attendance tracker. For real-time editing and ongoing evaluations, you can save the files to your device, keep them on the company’s servers, or upload them to the tool’s cloud storage.

The most important benefit is that spreadsheet-based software like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, both are free to use, hence saving money.

Apart from all these benefits, automated software is a boon these days.

Conclusion

You can track your employees’ attendance by using excel sheets or by using comprehensive attendance management software. Both come with their own pros and cons.

The use of employee attendance sheets in excel is simple and free.

However, they have their own restrictions. You won’t be able to track trends and other crucial attendance-related indicators even if you use templates.

Thankfully, there are various attendance tracking software options readily available right now. Not only can they assist in keeping track of attendance, but they also offer thorough data to assess worker productivity. Be it a spreadsheet-based system or automated software, choose the attendance management system as per your organizational requirements.