Staff Planning

Headcount-related expenses can be the most significant part of a company’s P&L. Consequently, headcount planning is often a detailed exercise that gets a lot of attention during the budgeting, forecasting, and reporting process. Calculations can include payroll taxes subject to wage ceilings, bonuses dependant on salary grades and company profitability, workers compensation insurance driven by job codes, and much more. And headcount is often tracked and planned using multiple dimensions, such as department or cost center, or employee type (direct vs. indirect, full-time vs. part-time, salaried vs. hourly, etc.).

Additionally, headcount may be a key driver for revenue, e.g., in consulting or other service businesses. Conversely, headcount may be driven by the revenue forecast, e.g. in manufacturing companies that plan factory hiring based on sales and production plans. And headcount is often a driver of other spending, such as capital (e.g. computer purchases for new hires), and allocations.

Furthermore, the starting point for a headcount plan is often detail from the company’s HR tracking system. Integration of this date into the plan may need to happen frequently, especially for updating rolling forecasts in large companies with many employees and frequent turnover.

And companies often want to do what-if analyses related to headcount. For example, what if we delay all hiring by one quarter? What if we change our annual raise assumption? What would happen to revenue if we increase our headcount productivity assumptions? What would happen to our hiring need if we ramp our sales plan up by 25%? And so forth.

Spreadsheet planning does not at all lend itself to these kinds of headcount modeling requirements. What’s needed is a purpose-built planning application, with a centralized database and automated data integration capabilities, plus driver-based modeling capabilities, and flexible reporting and analysis tools. What’s needed is Adaptive Planning.

Adaptive Planning does an exceptional job in the area of personnel planning.

• Plan by Employee or by Groups of Employees. Build your personnel plan either with specific employee detail, or groups of employees (e.g., 25 sales reps).
• Automatic Integration with HR Data. Easily and frequently import detailed or summarized headcount data from your HR tracking system, with our automated data integration capabilities.
• Unlimited Custom Dimensions. Create as many dimensions as you need to track headcount and drive related spending or revenue, e.g., employee type, job code, geographic location, labor grade, shift designation, billing code, etc.
• Sheet Templates. Use pre-configured sheet-building templates to speed up creation of sheets and related formulas for personnel planning.
• Customizable Data Entry Columns. Create headcount planning data entry columns to suit your planning needs. Columns can include hire date, end date, pay rate, bonus percent, etc., plus drop-down choices from the custom dimensions you use to track your headcount.
• Lookup Tables. Use lookup tables to assign values or assumptions to specific dimensions. E.g., assign workers compensation rates to job codes, or bonus percentages to salary grades, or productivity assumptions to billing codes, etc. These lookup tables can then be easily folded into formulas, removing the need for complicated IF statements.
• Automatic Payroll Tax Calculations. Automatically calculate payroll taxes in detail, by employee, subject to wage ceilings. FICA, Medicare, FUTA, and SUTA are automatically calculated by month, so that when an employee hits a wage ceiling, the calculation stops. Payroll taxes are calculated on tax calendar year, even if you plan in a fiscal year. You can also vary SUTA by state. Your administrator can manage the underlying assumptions (FICA rate, FICA ceiling, etc.). Payroll tax calculations can be easily modified for countries other than the U.S. Alternatively, take a high-level approach and plan payroll taxes as an overall percent of salaries and wages.
• Automatic Raise Calculations. Automatically calculate salary increases for employees, with a variety of choices. E.g., raise all employees by the same percent on their anniversary date, or raise all employees by the same percent on the same date, or raise employees based on a percent entered for each department or for each employee,etc.
• Allocate Headcount. Allocate or split headcount across dimensions, such as department, project, funds, locations, based on the driver of your choice, e.g., percentages, hours worked, etc. All personnel-related calculations are then allocated or split accordingly.
• Count Headcount Different Ways. Count number of heads in a variety of ways, e.g. number of employees present in a month, or number of employees present at month end, or full-time equivalents, or all non-contract employees, etc.
• Spread Choices. Spread salaries, wages, and other spending across the year in a variety of ways, e.g., evenly divided by 12 months, or based on the number of paydays in each month, or 4-4-5 or 5-4-4, etc.
• Other Calculations. Easily calculate any other personnel-related expenses, such as PTO based on number of months in service, floating days, overtime, shift premium, shift differential, vacation pay, holiday pay, etc.
• Other Driver Based Planning. Use Adaptive Planning’s powerful modeling capabilities to drive revenue from headcount, or drive headcount from production plans, or drive capital spending from new hires, etc.
• Tight User Security. Establish user roles and profiles to define who has access to what data, ensuring that confidential salary information is shared only with appropriate users.
• Reporting. Use our drag-and-drop report builder to easily sort and subtotal reports on any or all headcount dimensions. E.g. report on number of heads, spending by person, spending by department, location, type, etc.
• What If Scenario Analysis. Use Adaptive Planning’s modeling and reporting capabilities to easily perform what-if analyses based on different headcount scenarios.