Why Finance and HR Must Team Up for Smarter Workforce Planning

On the surface, HR and Finance seem to operate in different worlds: one focused on people, the other on numbers. But when it comes to workforce planning, these two functions are stronger together.

Talent needs are evolving fast, and without alignment between HR and Finance, organizations risk falling behind. This opens up an opportunity to make the most of your organization’s biggest investment: your people. Every headcount decision is a growth decision, and workforce planning helps ensure your talent strategy is fueling business performance, not holding it back.

Strategic workforce planning is where Finance and HR can unite to drive performance and impact. Done right, it helps leaders align people with business goals, avoid costly surprises, and unlock better decisions—all with greater agility.

In this article, you’ll learn what modern workforce planning looks like, how to overcome common challenges, and how organizations like Valtech are using Planful to bring Finance and HR together.

Workforce planning ensures you have the right people and skills at the right time (and at the right cost) to meet your business goals.

But what used to be an HR-led exercise is now a strategic responsibility shared across departments, with Finance playing a bigger role than ever. Why? Because the workforce has a massive impact on company performance. When labor plans are reactive or disconnected from financial goals, the costs add up fast.

Modern workforce planning helps Finance leaders move beyond just reviewing headcount requests. It’s about linking workforce data—such as compensation, benefits, taxes, workforce fluctuations, skills, and timing—to budgets, forecasts, and business outcomes. That requires alignment, visibility, and technology that keeps everyone working from the same source of truth.

It’s easy to confuse workforce planning with headcount planning. But they’re not the same.

Headcount planning tells you how many roles you need to fill. Workforce planning gives you the bigger picture: what those roles cost, which ones are critical, what skills are missing, and how staffing decisions impact company performance.

When Finance teams focus only on the number of open requisitions or the total salary line, they miss key drivers behind labor costs. Workforce planning zooms out and brings together the people story and the budget story, so you’re not left trying to reconcile one against the other.

Today’s workforce planning challenges can’t be solved in silos. Compensation models are growing more complex. Talent strategies are evolving. And the pace of change keeps speeding up.

That’s why Finance and HR need to work from a shared plan, grounded in real-time data and built around mutual accountability.

When HR brings the people insights and Finance brings the financial structure, workforce planning becomes a strategic lever, not a reactive exercise.

Valtech, a global digital transformation consultancy, used to manage workforce planning with a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual workflows. That approach held up until a major merger added 7,000 employees across more than 20 countries.
Suddenly, disconnected systems and siloed data became a serious risk.

Valtech adopted Planful to bring its Finance and People Ops teams onto a single platform. With HR and financial data connected, the company gained real-time visibility into workforce costs, open roles, and performance drivers.

We didn’t have that level of workforce insight before,” said Dominic Hawkes, Head of FP&A at Valtech. “Now we can answer questions more quickly because we have the data at our fingertips. That’s been really useful for the executive team as we look at different scenarios.

 

With that insight, Valtech made faster and more confident decisions, turning workforce planning into a strategic advantage during massive change.

The best workforce planning doesn’t happen in spreadsheets. It happens when Finance and HR work together in one platform, with tools designed to support collaboration, visibility, flexibility, and the agility to adjust plans on the fly.

That’s because workforce planning works best when it’s viewed as a team sport, rather than a siloed activity. When teams plan together in a connected environment, they are able to react faster to changing conditions, allowing them to drive smarter decisions, more accurate forecasts, and achieve peak financial performance.

Planful gives Finance, HR, and Ops the power to:

• Track the full employee lifecycle by monitoring hires, transfers, promotions, and terminations in real-time to understand how headcount trends impact financial outcomes.
• Understand what’s driving workforce costs—and why it’s changing— with rapid, comprehensive financial planning, designed to accelerate your decision-making.
• Model complex compensation structures, including wages, taxes, commissions, bonuses, region-specific rules, and more.
• Standardize workforce data to create a single source of truth across teams, enabling consistent and accurate planning, as well as effortless collaboration.
• Increase planning and reporting accuracy by managing performance at the compensation-item level, aligning plans with reality, and reducing budget surprises.
• Reduce turnover costs through proactive workforce planning by anticipating attrition, protecting key talent, and ensuring workforce investments deliver long-term value.

With Planful, Finance gains a clearer picture of workforce costs and the agility to respond to change confidently.

Workforce planning isn’t just a problem for HR to solve. It’s a financial strategy problem. Companies doing it well are those where finance leads the effort but never goes it alone.

Collaboration between Finance and HR unlocks the insights needed to manage costs, support growth, and stay agile in a shifting talent market.

Planful makes that collaboration possible.

Want to go deeper? Register for Perform25 to hear from Planful leaders, including Chief People Officer Mel Dreuth and CFO Dan Fletcher, for an inside scoop on our latest innovations in workforce planning.