Employee Attendance Sheets: Free Templates and Excellent Alternatives
Feb 17, 2023 • 8 min read
Here, we will focus on:
- What Exactly is an Attendance Sheet?
- How Can Employee Attendance Sheets Help?
- What Are The Limitations to Employee Attendance Sheets/Timesheets?
- The Best Alternatives to Employee Attendance Sheets/ Timesheets [software, automation]
- The Benefits of Attendance Tracking Software
We’ve created a free Employee Attendance Sheet to save you the time of creating a new attendance sheet from the very start. We’ll also discuss better ways to track the billable hours of your team that you should be looking into.
Before that, let’s look at,
What Exactly is an Employee Attendance Sheet?
An Employee Attendance Sheet is a sheet or document that is used to record an employee or team’s attendance data. This data is used to help with scheduling and HR purposes such as payroll and includes the employee’s days and hours worked, presence, absence, sick leave, and more.
A popular attendance tracking method is inputting attendance data manually into Excel spreadsheets or Google sheets to create Employee Attendance Sheets.
An Employee Attendance Sheet includes the following:
- Employee name and contact information
- Timesheet entries (their clocking in/out times)
- Total hours worked
- Reasons for absenteeism or hours/days not worked
- Signature/ digital signature
These sheets are usually created and updated using spreadsheet software like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
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How Can Employee Attendance Sheets Help You?
Having an accurate record of employee attendance at work helps employers at both remote and office-based companies
- Identify any issues related to attendance
- Helps with Planning and Scheduling
- Easy to use
- Identifies issues with attendance
- Helps with invoicing and payroll
- Accessibility
The benefits of attendance sheets:
1. They identify any issues and patterns related to attendance
Having employee attendance sheets provides you with more insight into attendance, including patterns. For example, you can easily see which employees are frequently absent.
2. They’re easy to use
Having formatted employee attendance sheets makes keeping accurate track of attendance easy to use.
3. Helps with even workload distribution and scheduling
By tracking attendance, you can observe who’s present, not there, running late, on PTO, on sick leave, etc.
This allows you to plan and schedule tasks for the day for those who are present and ready to work. Employee attendance sheets help with distributing the workload effectively and scheduling shifts accurately.
4. Payroll and invoicing
Tracking your employees’ hours and attendances makes it easier to record attendance data and this helps you pay your team accurately for their billable hours.
5. Accessibility
It is a major help to have all the employee attendance information readily available and pooled into daily, weekly, and monthly sheets.
The Limitations
1. Leaves room for mistakes
Attendance sheets (whether on Google Sheets, Excel or Word) leave room for error as they are only accurate as the information that is filled.
2. Lack of details
Attendance sheets lack features such as details, tasks, and productivity reports.
Using attendance sheets to measure factors like productivity can be difficult as these just show whether an employee was present on a certain day. They do not show the projects and tasks that the employee worked on and the amount of time spent on each process.
3. Difficulty tracking Overtime and Leave
By using just attendance sheets to track days worked, employees will be forced to either work out their own accrued vacation days, overtime, sick days and more or they would have you or your HR rep work it out for them.
This takes up time and increases the likelihood of making a mistake.
With an automated system, this information would be provided to your workers instantly and would be much more accurate without the hassle of manual calculations.
Any errors made when inputting or working out overtime and leaves manually could see your company face potential risk, as labour laws surrounding overtime and leave are always changing.
4. Payroll and Invoicing Limitations
As we said earlier, attendance sheets are only accurate when its data is accurate and up to date. Incorrect attendance sheets lead to inaccurate payment information which leads to inaccurate payroll and invoicing. This could be a major disruption and can take up time to find the root of the error and fix.
Some Excellent Alternatives to Employee Attendance Sheets
It’s clear that there are limitations when it comes to employee attendance sheets.
There are excellent alternatives, namely time and attendance tracking software and tools
You can choose to replace spreadsheets and Word documents for a more comprehensive software that prepares your attendance sheet for you.
Examples of these include
1. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a productivity management tool that helps to track attendance across company. It is used by both small and large businesses.
Key Features: System calculates hours automatically, detailed attendance and time reports, productivity dashboard, timesheet reports, work schedules, GPS tracking, improved payroll management.
We Like It Because: To help make batch payments, your payroll can be exported as a CSV file and uploaded to Wise (formerly TransferWise) or PayPal.
2. Clockify
Clockify has a cloud-based dashboard that can be accessed from any computer or mobile device, and it has a number of task-tracking features. It offers a free basic plan and four paid plans.
Hybrid workforces often work in multiple locations, so the calendar feature can be a helpful way for users to visually track their time, activities and work locations..
Key Features: Time tracking, project tracking, reports, calendars, GPS tracking.
We Like It Because: Even the free version has the basic features needed to track employee hours and users can easily view a breakdown of how they’re spending their time – it offers the ability to track time spent on specific projects.
3. BambooHR
BambooHR is a time and attendance tracking app designed with small and medium businesses in mind.
It offers a centralized employee database, payroll management system, applicant tracking capabilities, absence management features, etc.
Key Features: Payroll management system, applicant tracking, absence management features
We Like It Because: It’s designed with SMBs in mind and offers handy features like team members being able to edit their own personal information (employee self service options), and the ability to send leave requests from the mobile app.
4. Customized software and platforms like DigiWorks
DigiWorks uses its own software and dashboard to track attendance, time worked and projects/ tasks worked on. Being a remote-first company, the dashboard is geared to track remote team members projects and time. Employees can also request for PTO.
Employees can also log interruptions to workflows (example power outages) and request to make up the time in another shift.
Learn more about our dashboard and how we track attendance and productivity of our remote team members by contacting us here.
We Like It Because: Uniquely tailored to meet the needs of your remote workforce. Using customized software cuts out unnecessary features, you get just what you need.
5. Desk Time
DeskTime is a real-time and automatic employee attendance tracker.
It lets you track billable hours, track attendance as well as productivity, and also manage numerous tasks and projects.
It does offer limited integrations though— which could force you to keep manually transferring data between your workplace tools and waste time.
It offers a free plan for single users and paid plans start at $7/user monthly.
Key Features: Employee Time Clock, overtime tracking, PTO tracking, absence management,
Desktime offers a free plan for single users. Its paid plans start at $7/user per month.
Used to track the billable hours, track attendance as well as productivity, and also manage numerous tasks and projects.
We Like It Because: the software can be used for both the companies and the freelancers. Handy features like setting the minimum time an employee should spend on the computer.
6. Clockspot
Web-based timesheet software that helps track the time of the employees as well as their attendance.
Clockspot Attendance Tracking Features: Employee Time Clock, Timesheets
We Like It Because: It allows workers to track time with the help of online interfaces.
7. ClockIt
A workforce automation tool that has been helping businesses with tracking attendance and time, leave management, timesheets, as well as payroll.
Key Features: Calendar management, absence management, employee time clock, scheduling, track overtime, timesheets, leave, and a self-service portal.
You can expect high efficiency with the help of this software. It helps in calendar management, absence management, managing time sheets, track overtime, and more. It works great with RFID cards, fingerprint, facial recognition, and you can choose the best.
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The benefits of using an attendance tracking software
1. Cost and time effective
Attendance software will see you saving time and money as you would not need to task an employee with manually inputting attendance data every day, week, or month or making calculations, and you will not need to allocate your own time to make calculations.
2. You can manage remote and off-site employees
Attendance tracking software also lets you monitor the attendance of remote and off-site workers. It inputs the time that they work and you can also record their time entries and assign shifts.
They can also help on-field employees by clocking in and out automatically and logging time when they enter their worksite.
3. Compliance (with labour laws)
Attendance tracking software helps you stick to the rules easily as they are designed to comply with the labour laws of the country and most company policies.
The software can also track the exact number of employees you’ve hired and keep handy records of their payments.
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About DigiWorks
DigiWorks is an easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and start ups hire amazing remote talent from around the world. DigiWorks offers a way for you to hire, manage and pay people from all countries. If you find an amazing virtual assistant from Philippines, a content writer from Nigeria, or operations manager from South Africa – manage and pay your entire team from one platform with no hassle.
If you’re looking for a more affordable and sustainable option you might consider making use of a hiring platform like DigiWorks. Virtual assistant companies or platforms like DigiWorks are amazing as they not only match you with pre-vetted and assessed remote workers that can take care of all your business needs but they will also handle all onboarding and payroll needs as well.