Attendance list for courses: template and tips

Why keep an attendance list?

For many courses the list is more than a memory aid. Typical occasions where you have to or want to prove attendance:

Certificates of attendance: if you certify attendance, it should be possible to prove it. For German prevention courses subsidised by health insurers, regular attendance counts – more on that in the article on the certificate of attendance.
Funded programmes: funding programmes often require evidence of who attended on which day, sometimes with a signature. The programme itself sets out the required form.
Questions from parents and participants: “Was my child there on Tuesday?” – with a clean list that is quickly settled.
Planning: anyone who is often absent may need a different time. And if a course is regularly only half full, you see it early.

What belongs in the list

An attendance list needs a header and a table. The header contains:

the course title and, where applicable, the course number,
the course period, weekday and time,
the place or room,
the name of the course leader.

The table has one row per participant and one column per session. These columns have proved their worth:

Column	What for
Surname, first name	clear identification; for children's courses the child's name
one field per session with a date	short marks such as “x” for present, “e” for excused, “–” for unexcused
Signature (optional)	only if a funding programme or client requires it
Total	the number of sessions attended, for a certificate of attendance for instance
Note	short organisational notes, no health information

Define the marks once and write them at the bottom of the list. That way a stand-in can fill it in correctly too.

Keeping it data-light

An attendance list contains personal data. The General Data Protection Regulation requires you to collect only what you need for the purpose and not to keep the data longer than necessary (Art. 5(1)(c) and (e) GDPR). In practice that means:

Only the necessary columns: phone number, address or date of birth do not belong on a list lying around in the course room – unless a funding programme explicitly requires them.
Keep reasons general: “excused” is usually enough. Entries such as “flu” or “rehab” are health data and specially protected (Art. 9 GDPR).
Do not leave it lying about: collect paper lists after the course and store them locked away; do not send digital lists through private inboxes as attachments.
Decide on retention: keep the list as long as you need it for certificates, queries or funding evidence. If a funding programme requires a particular retention period, that applies.

Not legal advice. This article gives a general overview of German practice (as at September 2026). Which records you have to keep depends on your programme and on your clients or funding bodies.

A printable template

For a start on paper we have prepared a plain landscape template: a header area, 16 rows for participants and 12 columns for sessions, plus a total and a legend of the marks. The template is in German.

Download the attendance list as a PDF (A4 landscape, for printing)

Attendance in Kursimple

In Kursimple the list comes out of the bookings – nobody has to retype names:

Ticking off per course day: present or absent, with a reason from your own catalogue. The course leader does it in the instructor login (from the Plus plan).
A summary per participant: you see at once who attended how often – the basis for the certificates Kursimple creates for everyone at the end of the course (from the Plus plan).
A participant list as a PDF with a signature grid for up to 16 sessions and extra columns of your choice, if you prefer to tick off on paper.
An export of the attendance for funding bodies, the club committee or parents – and in the Pro plan day-by-day lists in the ESF format for funded programmes.
Deletion periods for customers and participants: once they expire you anonymise those people under “data protection”.

More about participants & attendance