An employee attendance tracker is a spreadsheet for recording who worked, who was out, and why across a day, a week, a month, or a full year. These free templates give you a ready-made employee attendance spreadsheet you can open, add your team to, and start filling in. Use the daily, weekly, or monthly sheet for day-to-day tracking, or the yearly tracker to manage paid time off, vacation, and sick leave in one place.
Employee Attendance Tracker Excel Template
Free daily, weekly, and monthly attendance sheets, plus a yearly PTO, vacation, and sick leave tracker. Each one works in Excel and Google Sheets, with dropdown status codes and totals that calculate as you type.
Table of Contents:
Try WebWork for Free
Resources
Templates
Why track employee attendance
Try WebWork for Free
Start 14-Day Free Trial
Book a Demo
No credit card | Cancel anytime
Why track employee attendance?
Reliable attendance data supports scheduling, payroll, and performance reviews. Tracking it consistently helps you:
- Catch lateness and absence patterns before they affect coverage or deadlines.
- Pay people for the hours they actually worked, with fewer payroll disputes.
- Keep clean records for audits, labor-law requirements, and HR reviews.
- Plan shifts and projects around who is available and who is on leave.
- Separate sick days, vacation, and PTO so leave balances stay accurate.
What to include in an employee attendance sheet
A good attendance sheet in Excel or Google Sheets stays simple but consistent. Whether you build your own or use the templates below, these are the fields worth tracking:
- Employee name (and ID, if you use one), plus department or position.
- The date or date range the sheet covers.
- A status for each day — present, absent, late, or a type of leave.
- Time in, time out, and break time for hourly or shift-based staff.
- Total hours worked, calculated from the times above.
- A notes column for context, like the reason for a late arrival.
Not every sheet needs every field. A daily headcount for a small team looks different from a monthly sheet for a hundred people, and the four templates below cover both ends.
Attendance status codes
Consistent codes keep a shared sheet readable and make the totals add up. Every template uses the same set, and each code fills its cell with a color automatically when you pick it from the dropdown.
| Code | Status |
|---|---|
| P | Present |
| A | Absent |
| L | Late |
| WFH | Work from home |
| V | Vacation |
| S | Sick leave |
| H | Holiday |
You can rename or add codes to match your own policy. Just keep them consistent across the sheet so the counts stay accurate.
Free employee attendance tracker Excel templates
Four templates cover the most common tracking needs. Each attendance tracker template here is free, works in both Excel and Google Sheets, and calculates its own totals. All you need to do is fill in the statuses and the summary updates on its own.
Daily employee attendance sheet (Excel & Google Sheets)
Track a single day at a time. Add each person's name, position, and department, choose a status from the dropdown, and log their time in, time out, and break. The sheet calculates total hours per person and keeps a running count of how many were present, absent, late, or on leave, along with total hours for the whole team.
Best for: shift-based workplaces, daily headcounts, and teams that want a quick record without much setup.
Weekly employee attendance sheet (Excel & Google Sheets)
Set the week's start date, then mark a status for each person from Monday to Sunday. The template totals each employee's days worked, days absent, and leave days down the row, and gives you team-wide totals at the bottom.
Best for: managers who review attendance weekly, rotating shifts, and weekly payroll runs.
Monthly employee attendance sheet (Excel & Google Sheets)
Choose the month and year, and the template fills in the weekday under each date for you. Mark daily statuses across the month, and each row totals attended days, absences, and leave, with an attendance percentage once you enter the working days. Team totals sit below the table.
Best for: HR and operations teams running monthly payroll or reporting on absenteeism.
Yearly PTO, vacation, and sick leave tracker (Excel & Google Sheets)
Manage time off for the whole year in one sheet. Set each person's allowance for vacation, sick leave, and PTO, then log days taken month by month. Used days add up automatically and the remaining balance updates as you go, turning red if someone goes over their allowance.
Best for: tracking leave balances across the year, annual reviews, and planning around time off.
Tracking more than a handful of people? Skip the manual marking and let attendance record itself.
Try WebWork for Free
How to create an attendance tracker in Excel
If you would rather build your own attendance tracker sheet, the setup is short:
- List your team. Put employee names in the first column, with columns for position or department if you need them.
- Add the dates. Across the top row, add the day, the days of the week, or each date in the month.
- Set up status codes. Choose a short code for each status (P, A, L, and so on) and add a dropdown with Data > Data Validation so everyone enters the same values.
- Add color with conditional formatting. Under Format > Conditional Formatting, give each code its own fill color so the sheet is easy to scan.
- Total it up. Use COUNTIF to count each status per person. For example,
=COUNTIF(B2:F2,"P")for present days and SUM to total hours.
Or skip the build and start from one of the templates above.
When a Spreadsheet Isn't Enough
A spreadsheet is a fine place to start, and for a small team it may be all you need. It gets harder to maintain as you grow as someone has to mark every status by hand, remote and field staff cannot clock in directly, and a shared file can be edited by anyone.
Once it is no longer convenient to fill out the timesheet by hand, teams start turning to professional time trackers like WebWork.
WebWork records attendance without the manual entry. Employees clock in and out from their own device, and their start and end times appear in your dashboard automatically. If someone starts late or leaves early, a prompt asks them for the reason, so the record explains itself. Time off is handled in the same place. Employees request leave, you approve or reject it in one click, and approved days appear in your attendance reports. For yearly balances, you can set a separate allowance for each leave policy and see how much each person has used.
Reports cover tracked hours, attendance, breaks, and payroll, and export to CSV, XLS, or PDF when you need a record outside the app. Pricing starts at $3.99/user/month.
FAQ
Yes. All four templates are free to download and use, with no signup required. Add your team, adjust the codes if you need to, and start tracking.
Yes. Each template works in both Excel and Google Sheets.
They cover different reporting periods. The daily sheet records one day with time in and out, the weekly sheet covers Monday to Sunday, and the monthly sheet tracks a full month with an attendance percentage per person. Pick the one that matches how often you report.
Click a day cell and choose a status from the dropdown — P for present, A for absent, and so on. The cell colors itself and the totals update automatically, so you don't count anything by hand.
Divide the days a person attended by the total working days in the period, then format the result as a percentage. The monthly template does this for you once you enter the number of working days.
At a minimum, an employee attendance sheet should include employee name, the date or period, and a status for each day. Add time in and out for hourly staff, total hours, and a notes column for context like the reason for an absence.
Use the yearly tracker to track PTO, vacation, and sick leave. Set each person's allowance per leave type, log days as they are taken, and the sheet keeps a running total of used and remaining days for the whole year.
When manual marking starts costing real time or the records stop being reliable, that's when you'll know it's time to switch to a professional software. Usually this happens as the team grows past 20 to 30 people, or when you add remote and field staff who can't be marked present from a desk. At that point automatic clock-ins and built-in leave tracking save more time than they cost.
Track Attendance Automatically with WebWork
Start 14-Day Free Trial
No credit card | Cancel anytime