Pick your month, set the week-off pattern, paste your employee names, and download a finished attendance sheet in Excel. Dates and day names are already filled in for that exact month, week-offs and national holidays are shaded, and the present/absent/half-day/payable-days formulas are live in the file. Open it, mark attendance, and the totals compute themselves.
Most attendance templates you find online are a generic grid with 31 columns and no dates. You still have to type the dates, work out which Saturdays are off, shade the holidays, and write the COUNTIF formulas yourself. That is the actual work. This tool does that part.
Attendance Sheet
What lands in the file
A single worksheet named for the month, with your company name in the header and one row per employee. Two header rows: dates on top, day initials below, so you can see at a glance that the 14th is a Saturday.
Week-off columns are shaded grey and pre-marked W. Holiday columns are shaded red and pre-marked H. Everything else is blank for you to fill.
The last five columns are formulas, not empty cells:
| Column | Formula |
|---|---|
| Present | COUNTIF(range,"P") |
| Absent | COUNTIF(range,"A") |
| Half day | COUNTIF(range,"HD") |
| Leave | COUNTIF(range,"L") |
| Payable days | Present + (Half day × 0.5) + week offs + holidays |
The first two columns are frozen and so are the header rows, so scrolling to the 28th still shows you whose row you are on.
Marking codes
Six codes, deliberately few. P present, A absent, HD half day, L leave, W week off, H holiday. The W and H cells arrive pre-filled.
Half days count as 0.5 in payable days. If your policy treats a half day differently, edit that one formula and the whole column follows.
The payable days column is the one that matters
Present and absent counts are easy. Payable days is where attendance stops being an HR record and becomes a payroll input, and it is where spreadsheets usually go wrong.
The default formula pays for week offs and holidays, which is correct for monthly-salaried staff in India. For daily-wage or contract workers you usually do not pay for week offs, so delete the two trailing COUNTIF terms and payable days becomes present plus half-days only. Two seconds of editing, and it is far easier to change one formula than to discover in month three that you have been overpaying.
Once you have payable days, the salary side is arithmetic: monthly gross ÷ total days in month × payable days. Run the full structure through the salary breakup Excel calculator if you need Basic, HRA and deductions split out, or the take-home calculator for net pay.
Alternate Saturdays, handled properly
The “alternate Saturdays” option marks the 2nd and 4th Saturday, which is what most Indian offices and all banks follow. This is the setting people get wrong most often when building a sheet by hand, because the 2nd Saturday is not the Saturday in the second week if the month starts on a Sunday. The generator counts actual Saturday occurrences, so it lands on the right dates every month.
Holidays
The three national gazetted holidays, Republic Day on 26 January, Independence Day on 15 August and Gandhi Jayanti on 2 October, are added automatically when you select those months.
State and festival holidays are yours to add, because they genuinely differ. Diwali, Pongal, Onam, Durga Puja, Gudi Padwa and Ugadi all fall on different dates in different years and different states observe different sets. Type the dates into the holidays box, comma separated, and they get shaded and marked across every employee row.
greytHR captures attendance from biometric, mobile or web, applies your leave policy, and pushes payable days straight into payroll with PF, ESI, PT and TDS filing. Used by Indian teams from 20 to 1,000+ employees.
Where this sheet stops working
Honestly, around 25 to 30 employees, or sooner if you run shifts.
A spreadsheet has no audit trail. When an employee disputes a deduction in March, you cannot show who marked them absent on 12 February or when that cell was last edited. There is no approval flow, so a regularisation request lives in WhatsApp and gets applied by whoever remembers. And biometric data arrives as a CSV with employee codes that never quite match your sheet, so somebody VLOOKUPs it every month and occasionally gets it wrong.
None of that is an Excel failing. It is just the point where the job changes from recording attendance to administering it. The HR software vs Excel guide works through the switching maths properly, and the HRMS vs payroll software comparison covers which tier to buy.
What companies report after moving off spreadsheets
These are published greytHR customer case studies, useful as a sense of the ceiling rather than a promise:
| Company | Result |
|---|---|
| Balajee Education (26 centres) | Payroll time cut by 85% |
| Color Papers (70+ employees) | Payroll processing cut by 99.8% |
| Wake’n’Code Technologies | Payroll time cut by ~80%, HR productivity up 30% |
| ByTheBook Consulting LLP | Payroll processing time cut by 70% |
| CG Foods (multi-plant) | Payroll processing cut by ~60% |
| Procloz Services | 99.5% payroll accuracy, manual workflows halved |
| Clout HR Solutions | Payroll processing time cut by 30% |
Read them with the usual caution: these are vendor-published, the starting points are not stated, and a company going from a broken manual process to any software will show a bigger jump than one with a tidy spreadsheet. The spread from 30% to 99.8% tells you the honest answer is “it depends entirely on how bad your current process is.”
Full list at greytHR case studies.
Frequently asked
Does the downloaded file need Excel? No. It is a standard .xlsx and opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice and WPS. The COUNTIF formulas work in all of them.
Is anything uploaded? No. The file is built in your browser with JavaScript. Employee names never leave your machine, and there is no sign-up or email gate.
Can I change the codes? Yes, but update the COUNTIF formulas to match. If you prefer “PR” instead of “P”, find and replace inside the formula row.
Does it handle overtime? Not in the sheet. Add a column and total it separately. Overtime tied to attendance is exactly the point where a spreadsheet starts costing more than it saves.