Recording staff attendance

Understand your obligations for recording staff attendance and how to fulfill them

​​​​​​​As part of your attendance management policy, you should have clear procedures and guidance in place for recording employee attendance. Your employees are expected to adhere to these.

The benefits to you as an employer of effectively recording staff attendance include:

  • effectively support employees' health
  • monitor and identify absence trends

Here you can find tools to use for recording staff attendance. We have also provided information on the legislation you need to comply with.

Data protection and the law

The information you are recording on staff attendance is classed as sensitive data. You must make sure that it is stored confidentially.

Everyone responsible for using data has to follow strict rules. These are called data protection principles. You can find out more about these in The Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018 (external site).

How to record attendance

We have developed a basic tool which you can use in your organisation.

There are several documents to choose from. We recommend that you read the user guide and experiment with the worked example first. This will help you to become familiar with the tool.

The resources available are:

  • excel tool
  • user guide
  • excel example document
  • trial data input and questions