What is an attendance report?
An attendance report summarises who was present, absent, late or on leave over a period, usually a month. It turns a register full of P and A marks into numbers you can act on: each person’s attendance percentage, total days absent, and patterns such as frequent Monday absences. HR teams use monthly attendance reports for payroll and absenteeism reviews. Schools and colleges use them to check students against a minimum attendance requirement such as 75%.
What’s included in the report
- Attendance % for every person, worked out the same way for everyone: present + late + ½ half days, divided by working days.
- Everyone below your minimum: 75% by default, or any threshold you set.
- Frequent late comers and the longest run of absences for each person, useful for spotting someone who needs a check-in.
- Daily attendance chart and day-of-week pattern, which show whether Mondays or Fridays are your problem days.
- Overall attendance and absenteeism for the whole team or class.
- A CSV export for payroll or HR systems, and a printable PDF for your records.
Monthly attendance report format
The per-person summary follows the standard monthly attendance report format, so you can paste it straight into payroll or share it with managers. An example:
| Name | Working days | Present | Late | Leave | Absent | Attendance % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employee A | 22 | 20 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 95.5% |
| Employee B | 22 | 17 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 77.3% |
| Employee C | 22 | 14 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 72.7% |
Which attendance sheets it can read
Monthly attendance registers
The classic layout: names down the left and one column per day, with day numbers (1 to 31), real dates or labels like “Mon 1” across the top. Title rows, weekday rows, serial numbers and total columns are skipped automatically. If your dates run down the rows instead, that’s detected too.
Biometric and punch-machine exports
Logs with one row per person per day, with columns such as Employee Name, Date, Status or In Time. When there’s only a check-in time, you choose the cut-off for late arrivals, and blank check-ins count as absent.
Attendance codes
P, Present, ✓ and 1 count as present. A, Absent, X and 0 count as absent. L, CL, SL, EL and PL count as leave. LT means late, HD means half day, and H, W, WO and Off mark holidays and weekly offs. Anything unusual is flagged so you can choose what it means.
Making an attendance report in Excel vs using a generator
You can build an attendance report in Excel with COUNTIF formulas for each code, a percentage column and conditional formatting for anyone under 75%. It works, but the formulas break when the sheet layout changes, and weekday patterns or absence streaks are hard to work out by hand. The generator does all of that from the sheet you already have, in seconds, without changing it. If you only need one person’s number, the attendance percentage calculator is quicker.
Who it’s for
- HR and payroll teams preparing monthly employee attendance reports and absenteeism numbers.
- Small business owners and managers who keep a staff attendance register in Excel.
- Schools, colleges and coaching centres checking student attendance against a 75% rule.
- Clubs, volunteers and training programmes that track sessions attended.
Still on paper? Start with the free monthly attendance sheet template, which is laid out so the generator can read it straight away. And if you’d rather not collect sheets at all, Clocked Live records attendance as your team checks in and builds this report for you every day.