Employee Attendance Tracker: What It Is & How to Use One [+ Free Template]
An employee attendance tracker is a way for you to track your employee’s attendance, tardiness, absenteeism, and time off—a major part of managing employees. Often set up like an employee attendance calendar, you can track employee attendance by manually inputting data on a spreadsheet or through attendance tracking software. A good employee attendance tracker allows you to quickly identify repeat attendance-related offenses and act swiftly to discipline and coach your staff to correct such behavior.
If you choose to track manually, download our free attendance tracker template to get started.
Let’s take a closer look at how to use manual and software-based employee attendance trackers.
Manually Tracking Employee Attendance
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 help in managing employees by showing each employee’s attendance history in one tracker.
Tip: We recommend you use a template that records attendance for each pay period. Aligning your attendance tracker with your payroll will allow you to easily compile and review necessary data.
We’ve set up our free attendance tracker template as a two-week view, which works well with companies that run payroll every two weeks. We have also started the template with four payroll periods for your convenience. You are free to change the template to fit your needs.
Using Software to Track Employee Attendance
While manually tracking employee attendance can be fairly straightforward, 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 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. It combines time sheets and attendance tracking, giving you a one-stop shop for all of your payroll and attendance-related data.
The right software will automate data entry, integrate with your time tracking system, and generate easy-to-view reports—making employee management easy for you while helping you save time. We recommend the following software:
If you want more options, then check out our guide to the best time and attendance software for small businesses.
Bottom Line
Employee attendance tracking gives you vital information about how your business operates. It makes it easy to keep track of the days each employee comes to work—and when they don’t. You can track manually by downloading our free employee attendance tracker, or by using attendance tracking software.
Using a tracker to keep attendance-related concerns in check will also help in counteracting a drop in employee engagement before it blows up into a major problem. For instance, when employees continually show up for work tardy, that causes a ripple effect—affecting not only business productivity but also employee morale. If other employees see one employee show up late consistently and not suffer any consequences, they may start acting the same way and not care as much about their work.