The best tool for creating an employee attendance template is Microsoft Office Excel. This tool not only helps you record attendance but also lets you generate summary charts and reports which can be printed out. Excel offers the simplest and easy-to-learn method to summarize critical information for scannable year-to-date employee status reports. The information entered into an Excel employee attendance sheet template can be treated as a Comma Delimited Database (CSV) and accessed by other applications for reports and analysis.

You Need To Define Your Needs First for Attendance Sheet Template

Before you can create an employee attendance sheet template, you need to define your needs. Be sure you have answers to questions such as:

• What specific information do you want to derive? Attendance status, quick reports, input for payment processing, individual vacation totals, totals of sick and personal days, all total days off?
• Are you looking for annual reports, or monthly breakdowns? Would you be happy with quarterly data instead?

Limitation of Excel

MS Excel has only 256 columns, and the average working year has 260 days. It would be better if you focused on creating an employee attendance sheet template for 3 to 6 month periods in one worksheet, instead of an entire year.