Every school or college teacher can name a couple of students who regularly skip class. But if you need a reliable student attendance tracker and a way to analyze attendance over time, you’ll need something better than your memory and a stack of old-fashioned paper attendance lists.
Luckily the education sector is steadily catching up with other workplaces and adopting new technologies to modernize working practices. Moving time-consuming manual processes online allows tasks to be automated. This saves teachers precious time and helps administrators to run their schools more effectively.
Attendance tracking is one of the main education management tasks that can be transformed with the use of cloud (online) tools. However, it can be difficult to find software that’s both affordable for schools on a tight budget and easy for staff to use. As such, schools can consider Sheetgo’s Student attendance tracker template in Google Sheets.
Why use Google Sheets to create a student attendance tracker?
- Flexible: You can create your own attendance system to suit your school. When things change in the future you can simply adapt your spreadsheets, without the need for new software or IT support.
- Accessible: You can access data for all your classes from anywhere in the world on your laptop or smartphone.
- Compatible with everything: Every other piece of software in the world integrates with Google Sheets. If you have data stored in other programs (such as Google Classroom), you can easily download or directly import that data and centralize everything in Google Sheets.
- Easy to use: Almost every professional works with spreadsheets at some point during their life. Google Sheets is a very intuitive and user-friendly system, even for spreadsheet novices. This makes maintenance and training easier, and you can be sure that your system is future-proof.
Looking for a basic student attendance tracker template instead?
If you’re a teacher looking for a simple spreadsheet template to track attendance by yourself, try our Professor template.
This template does not consolidate information from multiple classes, so you won’t see a dashboard or any Sheetgo connections. Instead, it provides a simple way to record attendance and absences for your own classes.
How to get started
Sheetgo’s spreadsheet-based workflow template is a pre-built system for automated attendance management. It can be used by any school, college, or training center. It offers teachers a simple and reliable way to take roll while providing administrators and managers with automated attendance records for every student and class.
What is a spreadsheet-based workflow template?
A regular student attendance tracker template is a single file containing ready-made tables, charts, layouts, and formulas but a Sheetgo workflow template is a complete system. It’s a group of interconnected Google Sheets that exchange data between them. This allows you to share data with colleagues and other departments whilst working autonomously, in your own individual file.
A spreadsheet-based workflow template gives you:
- Organization and data privacy: Each file is dedicated to one specific task, keeping data flows secure and separated. Teachers have their own personal spreadsheets for tracking student attendance. At the same time, the manager can combine confidential data from all professors and classes into one central spreadsheet and dashboard.
- Scalability: Google Sheets has a powerful sharing function but when you have too many people working in the same file it can become overloaded with data and slow to process. Dividing data between separate, specialized spreadsheets keeps the system operating smoothly. When you need to add a new class or teacher, simply duplicate one of the spreadsheets and share it with the team member responsible.
- Integration: As well as enabling you to easily import and incorporate data from other software, a spreadsheet-based workflow allows managers to merge data from across the entire company. In a matter of clicks, you can connect your attendance management workflow with your finance workflow (or those from other departments) to generate a top-level report for directors.
What you get with this template
When you install the Sheetgo student attendance tracker template, four Google Sheets files with pre-built Sheetgo connections are saved to your My Drive.
- Three Class spreadsheets. Share these with your team of teachers, and make as many copies as you need for additional classes. Each teacher uses their copy of this spreadsheet to record if students are present, absent, excused, or tardy (late) for class. The spreadsheet automatically provides the teacher with averages and totals, so they can keep track of each student.
- One Attendance Management master sheet, for the school administrator or head of department. Sheetgo connections pull data from the teachers’ Class spreadsheets directly into this file. A dashboard displays key information such as attendance rates per class and the top 10 students who are repeatedly absent, in easy-to-read charts. An attendance tracker tab allows you to check if roll was taken for every class, each day. It flags up any teachers who have forgotten to take attendance. You also get an automated overview per student and an overview per month.
How to install the student attendance tracker workflow template
Click the blue button below to install Sheetgo’s Attendance tracker template.
Attendance template
Spreadsheets based workflow template to record and analyze student attendance.
How to use the student attendance tracker workflow template
- Login to Sheetgo with your Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox account.
- Click Install template, and Install on Google Drive.
- Wait a few moments while Sheetgo installs the template and creates the connections.
How the template works
The attendance management master file opens inside Sheetgo.
To open any of the spreadsheets, double click on the file in the sidebar on the right-hand side.
How to use the template
Step 1: Share with teachers
Share the Class spreadsheets with the teachers responsible for filling them out. To do this, open one of the files by double-clicking on it.
It opens inside Sheetgo. Move the blue sliding bar to the right of the screen and then open the file in a new browser tab by clicking Open in new.
Now rename the file as appropriate and click the green Share button to share the spreadsheet with the teacher responsible for that class.
Step 2: Enter student data
The spreadsheets in the template are provided with sample data to show you how the system works. Each teacher can overwrite the data with their own list of students, or if you’re the administrator you can do this for them.
Open a Class spreadsheet and go to the Instructions tab. Enter names in the Students list.
Step 3: Register attendance
During each class, the teacher can quickly take roll directly inside their spreadsheet.
There is a tab for each month of the year. The days of the month run across the top of the screen from left to right.
Using the dropdown menu under each day, the teacher selects whether each student is present (P) tardy or late (T) excused or absent (E) or unexcused (U).
Step 4: Automate the workflow
Every time you update the workflow, fresh data is pulled from the teachers’ class spreadsheets directly into the management spreadsheet. You can do this manually by clicking Run but you can also schedule automatic updates to make sure you’ve always got the latest data from all of your classes.
Go to the floating menu bar and click Automate. Choose how often you want updates. For monitoring student attendance, once a day is usually frequent enough.
Your student attendance tracking system is up and running!
Check out the dashboard tabs in the management master sheet. You can add your school logo to the main dashboard. You can also enter school holidays in the Daily attendance checker tab.
Optional: expand the workflow for other classes
You can duplicate any of the files to add more classes to the workflow.
Go to File > Make a copy.
Rename the file and share it with the teacher for that class.
Connect this file to the workflow using Sheetgo. Get instructions here or book a demo with our automation experts if you need help or advice in creating a larger workflow for the entire school.
Share with your administrator
If you’re not personally responsible for attendance management, tell your administrator about this student attendance tracker template so they can set up the system in your school. Click here to send them this article.
