The short answer: Excel wins on flexibility and price; an app wins on the only metric that decides whether your records survive past month two — daily friction. A spreadsheet's salary formula is exactly as accurate as the attendance data typed into it, and attendance data entered "later, from memory" is fiction with good formatting. If you reliably open your laptop every day, keep the sheet. Everyone else needs the record to live where the doorbell rings: on the phone.
The case for the spreadsheet
Let's be fair to Excel — it's a genuinely capable tool for this job:
- It's free (or already paid for), with no new account.
- Fully flexible — custom columns for anything: bonus, overtime, per-task rates.
- The maths is perfect. A 31-column attendance grid with a SUMIF does the standard salary formula flawlessly.
- You own the file. No vendor, no subscription.
If you manage staff like a small business — one sit-down session daily, laptop open — a well-built sheet works. The catch is that almost nobody's actual life looks like that.
Where the spreadsheet actually fails
1. The 7 a.m. problem
Attendance happens at the door, on weekday mornings, while you're getting kids to school. Nobody opens a laptop for that, and mobile spreadsheet apps make editing cell B17 a 45-second ordeal. So entries wait for the weekend — and weekend entries are reconstructions, not records. This is the same failure mode as every manual method in our attendance tracking comparison.
2. No reminders, no schedule awareness
A sheet doesn't know your cook works Mon–Sat or that your part-time cleaner comes twice a week. It won't nudge you to fill it in, it can't count the actual working days in a month from the schedule, and every empty cell is ambiguous: absent, or just not filled in? An app that knows the schedule computes the correct working-days base each month automatically — and even flags entries accidentally marked on non-working days.
3. Half days, advances, and edge cases turn into formula debt
The first version of the sheet is clean. Then a half day needs 0.5, an advance needs a deduction row that carries across months, a schedule changes mid-month, a second staff member needs a copy of the tab… A year later, the sheet has one author who understands it, and it isn't your spouse.
4. Sharing means screenshots
The month-end payslip your maid should receive — earned salary, deductions, net payable — has to be assembled and sent manually. In practice, it becomes a verbal number, which defeats the record's purpose. (Why the slip itself matters: the WhatsApp payslip argument.)
Side by side
| Excel / Google Sheets | StaffAround | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily entry | Open file, find row, type | One tap on a notification |
| Works at the door, offline | Poorly | Yes — offline-first, syncs later |
| Daily reminders | No | Yes — at the time you choose |
| Knows the work schedule | No — you maintain it | Yes — working days counted per month automatically |
| Salary formula incl. half days | Yes, if you build it | Built in, shown transparently |
| Advance auto-deduction | Manual formula upkeep | Built in (Plus/Pro) |
| Payslip to staff | Manual assembly | WhatsApp / PDF in two taps (Plus/Pro) |
| Multiple homes | More tabs, more drift | Switch households in one tap (Plus/Pro) |
| Price | Free | Free plan; paid from less than a cup of tea/month |
The verdict
Use the tool that matches when and where the data is born. Household attendance is born at the front door at 7 a.m. — so the system has to be one tap, on the phone, working without Wi-Fi, with a reminder that keeps the habit alive. That's not a spreadsheet. Keep Excel for what it's brilliant at; give the daily record to an app built for it. StaffAround is free for up to 2 staff members — run it alongside your sheet for one month and see which record is complete on the 30th.