Importance of Personnel Planning
Personnel planning and budgeting can be a painful and laborious exercise, especially when you have to source your own data and put together a complex spreadsheet.
Personnel and payroll planning is extremely critical to get right in order for the business to be successful. Employee costs tie in directly with profitability, therefore the finance department must understand and monitor the impact that payroll has on the organisation in order to keep tight control over those costs.
For most businesses, employee costs form a large part of the organisational expenditure and their are several associated costs that come with hiring employees.
Common Pain Points
The most common pain point regarding personnel planning are the following:
- Sourcing, collating and manipulating the payroll/HR data into the right format for budgeting and planning
- Formula and data inaccuracy – with so many variables (on-costs, start dates, accruals, awards, employee types, allocations etc.) it can be a nightmare to even test
- Accountability and control as often Finance is left to pick up the pieces even though department managers are responsible
- Scenario planning is virtually impossible as it is hard enough managing and collating a single version
- Reporting is too difficult as it is hard enough just populating the payroll budget let alone report from it
Some other noticeable areas of difficulty, which aren’t even mentioned because it generally cannot be done with spreadsheets include things like
- Inability to use payroll headcount for allocations and other cost drivers
- Handling of employee movements and splits between department
Solution (moving away from Excel)
The personnel planning issues listed above are generally faced by those still stuck using outdated Excel spreadsheets, which may be fine to handle a small number of employees. However, problems will eventually start arising when collaboration, tighter control and improved accuracy are required.
This is not solely an issue relating to personnel or payroll budgeting and planning. Many, if not all of those pain points also relate to other areas of a the entire financial budgeting process – things like revenue planning, overheads, capital expenditure etc.
QMetrix can help your organisation by transitioning away from Excel into a specific tools designed for budgeting and planning such as IBM Cognos TM1 and Adaptive Planning. Our consultants were once accountants dealing with these exact problems and are ready to work with you to fix them.
Contact us to learn how QMetrix can help your organisation improve budgeting and forecasting with a free trial.
