How to track staff attendance without a biometric machine

How to track staff attendance: the short answer

To track staff attendance, record each person’s arrival, departure and breaks every working day in one place that proves they were really there. AutoDial CRM does this through a staff attendance app on each employee’s phone.

Every method, from a notebook at reception to a fingerprint terminal, tries to answer the same three questions: did this person come in, when did they work, and can the record be trusted. Paper and spreadsheets answer the first two cheaply but struggle with the third, because anyone can write a time next to anyone’s name. Hardware answers the third but ties attendance to one door. Phone apps aim at all three by checking something about the person at the moment of the punch, such as a live face or the phone’s position. The right choice depends on how many people you employ, how many sites they work from, and whether any of them spend the day outside the office. The sections below set out what to record, how four methods compare, how to work out an attendance percentage, and what changes for staff who travel.

How to track staff attendance: what to record each day

Whatever tool you choose, keep the same small set of facts for every working day:

• Present or absent, with the reason for any absence
• First punch in, and whether it was after the late cut-off
• Last punch out, so total hours can be worked out
• Breaks, each with its length, not only a daily total
• Where the punch was made, for anyone who can start work away from the office

Write down your late cut-off and half-day rule before you start, so the record is judged against the same line every day.

How to track staff attendance: methods compared

How to track staff attendance in Excel and work out the percentage

A spreadsheet is a fair place to begin. Give each employee a row and each date a column, and use short codes: P for present, L for late, H for half day, A for absent. A count of each code at the end of the row gives the month’s totals.

The attendance percentage is simple arithmetic: days present divided by days scheduled, multiplied by 100. Count a half day as 0.5 if that matches your policy. An employee present for 19 of 20 scheduled days has 95%. The weak point is not the formula but the input. A typed P says nothing about whether the person was in the building, and on busy days the sheet is often filled in from memory a week later.

How to track attendance for field staff

Field staff break most office methods. A rep who starts at a customer’s premises cannot reach a terminal by the door, and a sheet filled in that evening is guesswork. Two settings solve most of this. First, allow punches from outside the office for those staff, so the punch records where the day actually began. Second, if you also need the route between visits, use live location that stops when the working day stops; the detail is on how to track field employees.

How AutoDial CRM helps track staff attendance

In AutoDial CRM, clocking in means a camera step (blink, then one action the app chooses at random) plus a position check against the radius of the person’s branch. Rules live on the branch: opening hours, weekly closing days, the time after which someone is late, what counts as a half day, and whether punching away from the office is allowed. Two buttons, Break and Resume work, time every pause. With no signal, the punch is queued on the phone and synced later. Employees can look back at their own hours across four periods, from today to the previous month. Managers pick a branch and a date range on the web, see who was present, late or absent, and download the result as an Excel file. The same app is also a calling CRM; see the telecaller app and the auto dialer app.

Tracking staff attendance: limits

No method is perfect. Phone apps depend on staff having a working smartphone with location on, and GPS can be rough indoors. AutoDial CRM’s selfie step checks that a live person is present; it does not match faces against stored photos. It also has no payroll, leave requests or shift rosters, so pair it with a payroll tool if you need one. Rules on recording staff photos and location differ between the UK, the EU, India and elsewhere (general information, not legal advice).

How to track staff attendance: an example

An illustration, not a named customer. A letting agency in Leeds, UK, has 14 staff: 10 in the city centre office and 4 viewing agents who start most days at a property. Attendance lived in a paper register and a spreadsheet the office manager updated on Fridays. She sets up two branches in AutoDial CRM, “Leeds office” with a 150-metre radius and outside punches refused, and “Viewings” with outside punches accepted. In October the web report shows 3 late arrivals and an average attendance of 96%, worked out from 20 scheduled days. The Friday retyping session stops, and the month goes to the payroll bureau as one Excel file.