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Who's In

Who is here, who is not, and is the work covered

Attendance is a smaller question than time tracking and usually the more urgent one. Fifty notes for businesses of ten to fifty people, where one person does all of this alongside their actual job.

All notesStart here

All 50 notes

Grouped by subject. Each section has its own colour, which is a hint rather than the label — the section name is always written out as well.

The basics

4 notes

Three questions, and a spreadsheet that answers them. For a team under about fifteen this is the whole system, and building it teaches you what you would actually need from a product.

Holiday and leave

8 notes

Entitlement arithmetic causes most small-business disputes, and almost all of them come from part-time patterns, public holidays or a rule that was never written down.

Sickness

6 notes

What to write down and what to leave alone. The return-to-work conversation is the most effective practice here and it costs nothing.

Covering the work

7 notes

The operational problem all of this exists to solve. Most coverage failures were visible a fortnight out and nobody looked.

The legal side

8 notes

Less than the anxiety suggests and more than most spreadsheets manage. Four things to do, and a short list of situations where an hour of advice is worth it.

Tools

6 notes

Signals that a spreadsheet has stopped working, and the ones that look like signals and are not. Buying is a legitimate answer; so is not buying.

What not to do

8 notes

Practices that arrive with good intentions and produce grievances. Each one substitutes a mechanism for a conversation that was available.

Reference

3 notes

The end state as a checklist, the questions these records cannot answer, and the terms people use to mean different things.

What this is

Fifty notes on attendance and absence, written for businesses of ten to fifty people where there is no HR department and one person does all of this alongside their actual job.

Independent product comparisons, no sponsored content and no paid placement.

Four things that hold

A spreadsheet is a reasonable answer for a small team, and running one properly for six months tells you more about what you need than any requirements document.

The simple version is also the legally lighter one. Recording "sick" is ordinary data; recording a diagnosis is health data with a higher bar and no operational benefit.

Consistency matters more than strictness. Most disputes come from a rule being applied to one person and not another, and it usually starts as kindness.

The records are created by the people they describe. Sickness, reasons, fitness to return — all reported, not observed. Every enforcement measure spends some of the trust that makes the reporting accurate.

Where to start

Nothing tracked at all: the basics, and the first month described there.

Arguments about balances: leave.

Shifts running short: coverage.

Before introducing any scoring or monitoring: what not to do.

What this is not

Not legal advice. References to entitlement, sick pay, retention and discrimination law are general and vary substantially by jurisdiction.

It does not describe how to score people by absence, monitor activity, or require medical detail. Those appear only in the notes about not doing them.

Independent software comparisons

Long-form shortlists for small teams selecting attendance, absence and shift scheduling systems.

For one concrete product reference, visit Monitask and test it with the same access, correction and proportionality rules used throughout this site.