Paylocity, a leader in cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions, has officially announced the launch of a new solution called Headcount Planning, which is well-equipped to bring together finance, HR, talent acquisition, and hiring managers to create a more cohesive, data-driven approach towards workforce planning.
According to certain reports, the stated solution leverages Paylocity employee record as the single source of truth for company-wide headcount planning. More on the same would reveal how it enables businesses to proactively map headcount needs across the organization, manage workflows and approvals from initial forecasting through opening new roles, and offer comprehensive reporting to stay ahead of ever-changing talent needs as employees join, move, or leave an organization.
To understand the significance of such a development, we must acknowledge that, as a primarily finance-led function, today’s headcount planning process is often based on offline spreadsheets, disjointed meetings, and side conversations between different stakeholders. In response, though, Paylocity Headcount Planning allows cross-functional teams to easily come together and collaborate on centralized plans within the Paylocity platform. Such a facility, like you can imagine, treads up a long distance when it comes to conceiving a common location where business leaders can plan their headcount budgets, view any spend and forecast updates in real time as changes occur within the Paylocity system, and continually develop and adjust automated workflows that ensure the right people are always part of the review and approval process for headcount spending.
Talk about some of Headcount Planning’ specific features, they begin from its ability to plan creation and facilitate real-time management. This particular ability makes it possible for users to create or upload annual plans and manage them through the year in a single place, thus saving time, facilitating collaboration, and keeping everyone across the organization aligned.
Next up, there is the prospect of automation around the employee lifecycle. Basically, seamless connection to HR data should automate updates around employee life events, right from onboarding to role changes, and offboarding. Hence, the stated feature, on its part, can help your business generate efficiency, and at the same time, ensure the right decisions are made as plans change, employees turn over, and new requisitions are approved.
Moving on, Paylocity’s latest brainchild also empowers you to set clear company goals, meaning users can build out top-down or bottom-up hiring plans across departments and see committed forecasts in real time. Furthermore, leaders can set and measure headcount targets—such as budget costs or employee counts—for granular control of staffing plans.
“Planning for workforce growth shouldn’t be a manual, time-consuming task that relies on spreadsheets and ad hoc conversations to manage a company’s most valuable resource—its people,” said Toby Williams, Paylocity President and CEO. “With our Headcount Planning solution, we’re bringing together key decision makers across Finance, HR, and Talent Acquisition and ensuring they have the most up-to-date and accurate data from the Paylocity system to nimbly refine and adjust their headcount strategy. This solution gives CFOs and CHROs a way to partner more effectively in dealing with changing market conditions, employee movement, and the profitability pressure.”
Hold on, we still have a few bits left to unpack, considering we haven’t yet touched on how the all-new Headcount Planning solution is also well-equipped to actively expedite real-time changes and approvals using again its powerful automation workflows. This refers to how conditional workflows proactively notify the right people for approvals at each step in the planning process so to keep everyone on the same page and save time by implementing a more ideal planning process.
Another bit we haven’t discussed would be the new solution’s promise of generating optimal transparency to maximize human capital investments. The stated transparency comes from dashboards and analytics that offer deeper visibility into the decision-making process, efficiency and speed of requisitions, approvals, and job postings. Owing to the same, leaders can get a roll-up view which they can then use to make adjustments and ensure they are maximizing their people investments.
