Absence tracking spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a perfectly real way to track absence, and for a small team it is often enough. It is when the team grows past what you can hold in your head that the sheet starts lying to you — quietly, and always in the same five ways.
The five failures
The same fact in two places. Leave in one sheet, the rota in another. Fine until they disagree, and then nobody knows which one is true. The copied row. A new starter inherits the previous person’s hours, and the error surfaces only after somebody has taken too much leave. The overwritten formula. Somebody typed a number straight into a cell that was supposed to calculate. The sheet looks right and is not. Absence with no type. “Off” does not separate holiday from sickness, and those two should not come off the same balance. No history. When somebody asks why the balance says five and not six, there is nothing to look back at.
Separate the absence types from day one
This is the one structural change worth making even if you stay in the spreadsheet. Holiday comes off a balance. Sickness does not. Other absence — unpaid leave, time off in lieu, training — may have its own rules where you are. A column that only says “off” forces you to remember which it was, and that memory is exactly what fails when somebody asks four months later. One column for the type costs nothing to add now and cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
What has to come with you if you switch
Before moving to a tool, check it can do these four — otherwise you have swapped one problem for another: Separate holiday, sickness and other absence. Work out holiday in proportion to hours, not per head, if you have part-timers. Show absence and the rota in one view, so the two cannot say different things. Let you get your data back out. The fourth is the one people forget to ask about, and the only one that decides how easy the next move is.
When the spreadsheet is still right
Switching is not always the answer. Stay in the sheet if: The team is under five and everybody works roughly the same hours. Leave is agreed in conversation and written down the same day. You are the only person who edits it. If all three hold, a tool is most likely just another place to forget to update. It is when two people edit, or when contracted hours diverge, that the sheet costs more than it saves.
What Rota does about it
Rota keeps absence and the rota in one view, and that is the whole point: they cannot say different things when they are the same thing. Holiday, sickness and other absence are separate types. Only holiday comes off the balance. The allowance is worked out from contracted hours, with the sum shown. It is free, needs no account, and the week lives in your browser — so there is no supplier to ask for your data back from.
Frequently asked questions
Can I keep using a spreadsheet for some of it?
Yes. Plenty of places keep payroll and history in a sheet and use a tool only for the week and the absence. What rarely goes well is holding the same fact in both.
How do I get the numbers out of Rota?
The timesheet downloads as CSV, and the week lives in your browser. There is nothing to request back from us, because we never had the copy.
Does sickness come off the holiday balance?
In Rota only holiday comes off the holiday balance; sickness and other absence are recorded separately. Which rules apply to sickness where you are is something to check locally — the tool does the arithmetic, not the interpretation.
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