Shelter Attendance & Bed Log Template
Shelter attendance is the case that breaks most attendance tools, for one structural reason: a stay does not fit inside a calendar day. Someone who arrives at 9pm and leaves at 7am has one stay, not two days of attendance, and any system that resets at midnight reports it wrongly.
Below is a printable nightly log, plus the digital version designed around stays that cross midnight.
No sign-up needed to print. Free tier for the digital version — no credit card.
Attendance sheet — Shelters & Day Centres
Date: ____________________ Location: ____________________
attendpad.com
| Name / ID | Bed / space | Time in | Time out | Nights this month | Staff initials |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Why midnight is the hard part
Nightly bed counts are usually the number a funder or commissioner asks for, and they're the number most likely to be wrong. If your system closes the day at midnight, an overnight guest either appears twice or disappears, and reconciling that by hand across a month is where the reporting time goes.
The second pressure is data minimisation. Shelter guests are among the most privacy-exposed people a service handles, and the correct instinct is to record as little as possible: enough to evidence the stay and keep people safe, and nothing that becomes a liability if it leaks.
The third is that staff are doing this at 2am during a handover. Anything that needs concentration will be skipped, which means the capture has to be one action and the correction has to be easy.
The same routine, without the transcribing
Print the sheet above and it works. What it can't do is add itself up. If you're doing this every day, here's what changes when the sheet becomes a QR code on the wall:
Stays that carry past midnight
Turn on overnight stays and a session stays open until the person actually checks out, rather than resetting at the calendar boundary. One stay counts as one stay.
Forgotten check-outs become a review list
Set how long a session may stay open before it's treated as unresolved. Those move to a separate list for staff to reconcile, instead of quietly inflating your occupancy figures.
Collect deliberately little
Every field is optional except a name, and you can use an identifier rather than a name. Personal fields are encrypted at rest, and every read and export is audit-logged.
Live occupancy for handovers and fire safety
The manage view shows who is currently on site, which is the list you need at a shift handover or during an evacuation — not a spreadsheet someone has to open and filter.
Recommended setup
Use a Room with overnight stays enabled and a maximum session length set. This is the configuration the feature was built for, and it's what makes nightly counts reconcile.
More detail on the mechanics: QR code attendance, daily check-in rooms, and what's free vs Pro.
Frequently asked questions
How does an overnight stay get counted if it crosses midnight?
With overnight stays enabled, the session remains open past midnight and closes when the person checks out, so it's recorded as a single stay with real arrival and departure times rather than being split across two dates.
What happens when someone leaves without checking out?
Set a maximum session length. Sessions exceeding it stop counting toward live occupancy and move to an unresolved list for staff to review and close, so your bed count stays accurate without silently deleting the record.
Can we record stays without collecting personal details?
Yes. Name is the only required field and it accepts an identifier rather than a legal name. Email, phone and everything else are individually optional, so you can run a log that holds almost no personal data.
Can we produce monthly figures for a funder?
Export any date range to CSV with arrival and departure timestamps and total duration per stay, or to PDF for a formatted report. Signatures, where collected, are included.
Is a signature required at check-in?
It's optional and configurable per room, for check-in, check-out, or both. Some services need it for their own records; others deliberately don't ask.
Templates for other settings
Stop retyping the sheet
Three free active sheets and one free room, unlimited check-ins, no credit card. Set up in under a minute.