What is in the download

The file has two sheets. The first, 'Staff Attendance', is the monthly register. Its header carries Outlet, Manager and Month, so a multi-outlet brand can keep one file per outlet and still tell them apart when they are emailed to accounts. Below the header is one row per employee with these columns: Emp ID, Employee Name, Role, Usual Shift, then Day 1 to Day 31, then the totals block, then OT Hours and Manager Sign.

Role is a dropdown with Kitchen, Service, Cashier, Manager, Housekeeping and Delivery. Usual Shift is a dropdown with Lunch, Dinner and Split. Both exist so that the sheet can be sorted and filtered by section, and so that a reviewer can spot a cashier marked S (split shift) when the outlet only runs split shifts for kitchen staff. The day cells accept six codes: P for present on a single shift, S for a split shift worked, HD for half day, WO for weekly off, A for absent and L for approved leave.

The totals block per employee counts Present (P plus S), Split Shifts, Half Day, Weekly Off, Absent and Leave, then computes Payable Days as Present plus half of Half Day plus Weekly Off plus Leave. Below the employee rows is a 'Staff present per day' coverage row that counts P, S and HD entries in each day column, so a manager can see at a glance that Day 14 had only four people on the floor. The second sheet, 'Codes', lists every code with its meaning and the payable value, so a new manager does not invent a seventh code. The monthly attendance sheet template covers the generic version; this one adds the restaurant-specific columns and coverage row.

• Sheet 'Staff Attendance': Outlet / Manager / Month header, one row per employee, Day 1 to 31
• Columns: Emp ID, Employee Name, Role (dropdown), Usual Shift (dropdown), day cells, totals, OT Hours, Manager Sign
• Codes: P, S, HD, WO, A, L, defined on the 'Codes' sheet with payable values
• Formulas: Present = P + S; Payable Days = Present + 0.5 x HD + WO + L; coverage row counts P, S and HD per day

How to use it every day and at month end

Fill the sheet once a day, after the last service closes, from whatever you use during the shift: the roster on the wall, the manager's notebook or the closing checklist. Do not fill it in advance from the roster, because the point of an attendance sheet is to record what happened, not what was planned. If you also use the restaurant staff schedule template, the two should disagree on a few days every month; those differences are your no-shows, swaps and extra covers.

Use S only when the employee actually worked both parts of a split shift, for example 11:00 to 15:00 and 19:00 to 23:00. An employee who was rostered on a split but left after lunch service is HD, not S. Enter OT Hours as a monthly total in decimal hours (2.5, not 2:30), and only for hours beyond the daily limit under your state's Shops and Establishments Act, because overtime is paid at twice the ordinary rate and an inflated OT column is expensive.

At month end, check three things before the manager signs. Every row should have exactly as many entries as days in the month; a blank cell is usually an unrecorded absence. Weekly Off should be four or five per person depending on the month; fewer means someone did not get a rest day, which is a legal problem, not just a payroll one. Payable Days multiplied by the per-day rate from the salary per day calculator gives the gross for daily-rated staff; monthly-salaried staff use the same count to compute loss of pay.

• Fill after close, from the day's actual events, never in advance from the roster
• S only when both halves of the split were worked; otherwise HD
• OT Hours as a monthly decimal total, only for hours beyond the daily statutory limit
• Month-end check: no blank cells, four to five WO per person, manager signature on every row

Split shifts and spread-over: the rule most outlets break

Restaurants run split shifts because lunch and dinner are busy and the afternoon is not. A split shift is legal, but the total span from first start to last finish, called the spread-over, is capped by the state Shops and Establishments Act, and most states set that cap somewhere between 10 and 12 hours including breaks. A cook who starts at 10:00 for lunch prep and leaves at 23:30 after dinner service has a spread-over of thirteen and a half hours, which exceeds the cap in most states even though the hours actually worked may be within nine.

The attendance sheet cannot police this on its own because it records days, not times. What it can do is make the pattern visible: an employee with 24 S entries in a month is doing a long spread-over every working day, and the manager should be asked whether that person gets the rest interval the Act requires between the two halves. If you need the times themselves, use the in-out time attendance sheet for the split-shift staff only, or move that group to app-based punching.

Check your state's Shops and Establishments Act for the exact daily hours, spread-over and rest-interval numbers, and keep a copy of the applicable notification with the attendance file. Inspectors ask for both.

• Spread-over is first start to last finish including breaks, and it is capped by the state Act
• Track S counts per employee; a full month of S entries is a spread-over red flag
• Record actual in and out times for split-shift staff if you cannot prove the rest interval otherwise
• Keep the state notification with the attendance file for inspection

Weekly off for restaurant staff

Restaurants are open on the days most people rest, so the weekly off is rotated rather than fixed. The state Shops and Establishments Act still requires one full day of rest in every week for every employee, and most states require the establishment to display which day each employee is off. That is why the sheet has a WO code rather than treating an off day as blank, and why WO counts as a payable day: a weekly off is paid rest, not an absence.

The common failure is the 'double shift instead of off' arrangement, where a steward works his off day for a friend and takes the friend's off day the following week. The sheet will show two P entries where a WO should be, then two WO entries the next week. That is allowed in some states if a compensatory off is given within a set window; in others it is not. Either way, the sheet must show what actually happened, and the manager should record the swap and the compensatory off on the same row. Our guide to weekly off rules under labour law explains how the state Acts treat swapped rest days.

For outlets with seven-day operations and split shifts, rostering the weekly off so that no section is short on a Friday or Saturday is the real planning problem. The coverage row at the bottom of the sheet is there to show, after the fact, whether the roster achieved it.

• One full rest day in every week for every employee, rotated and displayed
• WO is a payable day; never leave an off day blank
• Record off-day swaps and the compensatory off on the same employee row
• Use the coverage row to check that weekend service was not staffed by skipping rest days

Tips, service charge and incentive days are not attendance

Many outlets keep a second sheet for tip pool shares or service charge distribution and are tempted to merge it with attendance because both are 'per day per person'. Keep them apart. Attendance decides wages, weekly off, leave and statutory contributions; tips and service charge are distributions with their own rules and are not part of the wages definition for EPF or ESI unless your policy makes them so. Mixing the two produces an attendance sheet that nobody can hand to an inspector and a tip sheet that nobody trusts.

The same applies to incentive days, such as a bonus for working all four weekend nights in a month. Compute those from the attendance sheet after it is signed, in a separate calculation, so that a dispute about the incentive does not reopen the signed attendance record.

If your outlet uses a tip pool, the fair approach is to share it by hours worked or shifts worked, both of which the attendance sheet can supply once it is final. That is a downstream use of attendance, not a reason to change the codes.

• Attendance sheet for wages and statutory records; separate sheet for tips and service charge
• Compute incentive days from the signed attendance sheet, never inside it
• Share tip pools by hours or shifts taken from the final attendance, not from a parallel count

When to move restaurant attendance to an app

A single outlet with twelve staff and one manager who closes every night can run on this sheet for years. The sheet stops working at three moments: when you open a second outlet and the owner can no longer see who is on the floor without a phone call, when split-shift staff dispute their spread-over and you have no in and out times, and when payroll starts taking two days because the accountant re-types six sheets.

Restaurant time and attendance software replaces the sheet with punches. Staff mark in and out on a shared tablet at the pass or on their own phone with a selfie, the split shift is two punch pairs with the actual rest interval visible, the weekly off comes from the published roster, and the coverage row becomes a live view of who is in the building right now. Payable days, half days and overtime are computed by the same rules you wrote on the 'Codes' sheet, and the monthly output goes to payroll without re-typing. Attend Mitra's restaurant staff attendance software does exactly this, with kiosk mode for a shared tablet, selfie and face verification, shift templates including split shifts, and attendance-linked payroll preparation; the time and attendance software for hospitality page covers hotels and multi-outlet brands.

If you are comparing products, our best attendance software for restaurants page lists what to test. Until then, download the sheet, print the 'Codes' page and stick it beside the roster.

• Stay on the sheet while one manager can see the whole floor and payroll takes hours, not days
• Move to an app when you add an outlet, when split-shift timing disputes start, or when re-typing sheets becomes the payroll bottleneck
• Carry the same six codes and the payable-day formula into the app's rules so nothing changes for staff