What is a daily time record (DTR)?
A daily time record, or DTR, is a one-page monthly form that shows when an employee arrived and left each day, in the morning and in the afternoon, with the hours worked and any undertime. The employee signs it at the end of the month, a supervisor verifies it, and HR uses it to check attendance and compute pay for the cutoff.
Government offices in the Philippines use the Civil Service Commission's own form, CS Form No. 48. This template follows the same AM and PM layout for private companies, BPOs, VA agencies and remote teams, and adds the totals that a paper form leaves you to work out by hand.
DTR form layout
Every day of the month gets one row with four times: AM arrival, AM departure, PM arrival and PM departure. The gap between the AM departure and the PM arrival is the lunch break, so it is never counted as work. Hours worked and undertime sit at the end of each row, and the Total row adds up the month.
- Header: name, employee ID, position, client or team, month, year, regular hours a day and supervisor.
- Remarks: the reason for a blank or short day, such as Rest day, Sick leave or Half day, approved.
- Signatures: the employee's, which certifies the record, and the supervisor's, with dates.
DTR sample: one filled week
Here is the first full week of October 2026 for Angela Reyes, a support agent with 8 regular hours a day and a one hour lunch:
| Day | AM arrival | AM departure | PM arrival | PM departure | Hours worked | Undertime | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon Oct 5 | 8:00 AM | 12:00 PM | 1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | 8:00 | 0:00 | |
| Tue Oct 6 | 7:55 AM | 12:00 PM | 1:00 PM | 6:30 PM | 9:35 | 0:00 | Month-end report |
| Wed Oct 7 | 8:00 AM | 12:00 PM | 1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | 8:00 | 0:00 | |
| Thu Oct 8 | 8:00 AM | 12:00 PM | 1:00 PM | 5:00 PM | 8:00 | 0:00 | |
| Fri Oct 9 | 8:00 AM | 12:00 PM | 4:00 | 4:00 | Half day, approved | ||
| Sat Oct 10 | Rest day |
Her whole month, in the filled example above, comes to 164 hours and 48 minutes worked and 4 hours 47 minutes of undertime. The Excel and Google Sheets versions add this up as she types.
How to compute hours worked and undertime
For each day, add the morning and the afternoon: AM departure minus AM arrival, plus PM departure minus PM arrival. On October 2, Angela came in at 8:12 AM, so her morning was 3 hours 48 minutes and her afternoon 4 hours: 7 hours 48 minutes in all.
- Undertime is the regular hours of a full day minus the hours worked. With 8 regular hours, 7:48 worked is 0:12 of undertime.
- A half day has only the AM pair or only the PM pair. Hours worked counts that half, and undertime shows the rest of the day.
- Without a lunch break, write the AM arrival and the PM departure only.
- Absences and rest days stay blank, with the reason in Remarks, so they don't show as undertime.
To turn the total into decimal hours for payroll, divide the minutes by 60: 164:48 is 164.80 hours. The decimal hours calculator converts any time, and the hours calculator works out a single day.
DTR template in Excel and Google Sheets
All versions have the same columns, so a team can mix them.
- Printable PDF in US Letter or A4, one portrait page, for staff who write their times by hand.
- Excel fills in the dates once you pick the month and year, computes hours worked, undertime and decimal hours for each day, and totals the month. The formula cells are locked so nobody types over them (Review > Unprotect Sheet unlocks them, no password).
- Google Sheets works the same as the Excel file: make your own copy, then share one per employee.
- Word suits teams that type their times into a document and email it.
Signing and keeping the DTR
At the end of the month the employee checks the record, signs it to certify that it is true and correct, and passes it to the supervisor, who verifies it against what they know of the month and signs too. HR then computes pay for the cutoff from the totals and keeps the signed DTR with the payroll records. For remote staff, a signed PDF or a shared Google Sheet does the same job as paper.
If your team already tracks time, the DTR doesn't have to be written by hand at all: see an online daily time record that fills itself from tracked hours.
