3 Benefits of Planning Your Workforce with a Modern FP&A Platform

Massive change has expanded the importance of Finance and HR’s roles within organizations. Planning for the workforce of tomorrow requires visibility into everything from organization-wide workforce costs to department-level compensation costs. Ensuring modern, efficient processes are incorporated means that HR and Finance need to work collaboratively. Some of the tools used in this process include FP&A platforms— these can play a huge role in effective workforce planning. 

Why FP&A Technology for Workforce Planning?

FP&A is charged with analyzing your business, modeling potential options, and helping the business budget and plan for the short- and long-term future. It’s up to FP&A to ensure financial health while meeting strategic business goals. Obviously, they need data from every part of the organization to build these plans, and they need to collaborate closely with every team to guide decisions and understand cost tradeoffs. So, it just makes sense to work within the same solution rather than disconnected systems or complex spreadsheets.

Since the HR team handles the employee lifecycle, from recruitment to retention, both teams require insights from one another to make effective workforce decisions for the business. To do so, FP&A technology has provided immense opportunities to improve the work these two teams have focused on, within scattered spreadsheets for years. With FP&A technology that supports workforce planning, you are able to:

1. Build Standardized Processes

Time and time again, the pressure to meet the countless financial planning and reporting requirements and regulations causes teams to feel destressed and frantic. In order to build confidence and have control over how information is brought in and delivered, a modern FP&A SaaS platform allows you to draw in data from any system. Plan your workforce knowing that you can:

• Eliminate errors resulting from manually intensive processes with standardized compensation calculations
• Automate the integration of HR, operational, and financial data from any HCM, CRM, or ERP to see the most accurate picture of your business
• Categorize data with pre-established financial intelligence and logic, saving you countless hours

2.   Plan Dynamically

With constant changes in your business, having the proper workforce planning processes enable you to effectively analyze, plan and make decisions at the speed at which change occurs. The right platform enables high-frequency, data-driven decision-making. This will ultimately help your business by:

• Creating workforce planning scenarios, connected to hiring plans and financial models
• Tailoring workforce recommendations across all lines of business to ensure compensation and hiring is aligned with future business growth
• Customizing compensation attributes to handle the complexity of taxes, benefits, deductions, etc

3.   Gain Insightful Reporting and Analysis

For effective workforce planning, an FP&A platform helps your teams leverage a single source of truth to better understand how to set clear objectives for strategic analysis. Stakeholders are tuned into the latest status of the business’ financial and people performance allowing a clear direction forward. Your business can:

• Gain visibility into how compensation aligns with employee turnover, workforce costs, and revenue growth
• Test hypotheses that map to business goals, like analyzing churn indicators to improve retention
• Equip teams with self-service access to relevant insights and plans in the format they are used to consuming information – a presentation deck, dashboard, or report

SmartyPants Vitamins is one of many companies benefitting from our FP&A platform. The company’s senior finance manager said that they aimed to simplify health without sacrificing quality. Due to its rapid sales, they had a similar objective to simplify the sales and trade spend forecast process, at no expense to quality and business downtime. With Planful, the company found a quick, effective solution that enabled them to kick-start their financial and workforce planning processes within 20 days.

Your workforce is mostly both the largest single cost and your greatest strength. There are a lot of challenges that come with trying to make your Finance and HR teams strategize and plan as one. We are able to help you bring people together in your organization so that you can manage talent gaps and help leaders in the decision-making process. If you wish to adopt a fast, scalable solution to plan your workforce and business growth, we are here to help.

To learn more, read about the latest research on modern planning, modeling, and forecasting.