Build a headcount reporting dashboard for more strategic growth

A headcount reporting software brings together key metrics and data points from various systems into a single, easy-to-understand interface. This centralized view helps companies track workforce changes, identify hiring, retention, and termination trends, and make strategic decisions about their most valuable asset—their people.

A well-designed headcount dashboard includes essential metrics and ensures you can access high-level insights and detailed analytics whenever you need them. This article discusses the importance of headcount analysis and reporting for SaaS businesses, highlighting the most important metrics to track in your headcount reporting dashboard.

What is headcount reporting?

Headcount reporting is the process of tracking and analyzing the number of employees a company has. It involves maintaining detailed records of all personnel within the organization, including full-time, part-time, contract employees, and temporary staff. 

Beyond basic employee counts, headcount reporting includes monitoring their movements within the company, from the date new hires join the company, when they leave, and all the internal transfers and promotions in between. It also tracks key HR metrics such as attrition rates, vacancy rates, and the demographics of a company’s workforce. 

Different companies use different types of headcount reports, including:

• Headcount summary report: Provides an overview of total headcount across departments or locations.
• Headcount by demographics: Tracks employee distribution by factors like age, gender, and tenure.
• Headcount walk: Monitors employee changes such as hires, exits, and transfers.
• Vacancy and open positions report: Provides information on unfilled positions and tracks recruitment progress.
• Attrition and turnover report: Analyzes voluntary and involuntary employee exits. 

Why headcount analysis and reporting matters

Headcount directly impacts “people costs”—one of the largest expenses for any organization. Here’s why it is important for SaaS companies:

1. Financial management

Accurate headcount reporting aids budgeting, financial forecasting, and managing people costs. Business leaders can not only track expenses related to employee salary and benefits, but also identify spending patterns across different departments and roles. This helps them optimize their resource allocation and maintain financial growth. 

2. Strategic workforce planning

Headcount planning and reporting also provides business leaders with a realistic overview of their organization's current state. The data-backed insights from headcount reports help them better understand their current staffing levels, identify productivity patterns and improve workforce ratios, as well as make more strategic decisions about hiring, restructuring, or expansion. 

3. Budgeting

Headcount reporting and budgeting are closely linked as workforce planning constitutes a significant portion of a SaaS company’s expenses. It ensures that companies can manage people costs effectively, acquire and retain the right talent, and align their workforce with long-term strategic goals.

Your headcount data directly influences workforce planning and resource allocation. Detailed headcount data enables finance teams to better estimate future costs—not just salaries but also related expenses like benefits, training, and workspace requirements.

4. Variance analysis

Analyzing the variances between the headcount plan and the actual data is key to understanding how well your plan is working. Combined with a headcount reporting dashboard, leaders can get a quick overview of key metrics and data, and more easily spot any emerging trends before they create a problem. For example, variance analysis can reveal departments are over- or under-staffed as compared to the plan, which roles or levels are over or under budget, and where salary costs deviate from the forecast. With these insights, they can adjust hiring plans, redistribute resources, and control costs. 

Headcount reporting should include all your key stakeholders 

Headcount analysis and reporting is critical for making informed decisions about organizational growth, restructuring, and investment. However, it shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. Headcount is something every leader of every team within the organization cares about because it directly impacts their ability to meet their goals and objectives. Your investors care about it, too, as it impacts the profitability of the business. 

Here are a some reasons why communicating with your stakeholders is such an important part of  headcount reporting:

1. Aligning goals with expectations

When different departments and teams operate with varying understandings of workforce data and its importance, it can lead to misaligned priorities and conflicting decisions. Effective stakeholder communication makes sure that everyone shares a common understanding of current headcount situations, future targets, and the reasoning behind workforce decisions.

2. Ensuring transparency in processes

When stakeholders understand the data behind the decisions – how headcount data is collected, analyzed, and reported – they are more likely to trust and act upon the information provided. For example, being transparent about how contingent workers are counted or how different employment types are classified help both internal and external stakeholders make more informed decisions regarding resource allocation.

Pro tip: Implementing a workforce planning software provides a single source of truth and complete visibility into headcount data for all stakeholders. 

3. Maintaining compliance and mitigating risks 

Through effective communication, startups can be better prepared for any potential challenges before they become pressing issues, such as gaps in their sales capacity that can impact their ability to meet their revenue targets.  

Accurate headcount reporting also enables business leaders and organizations to ensure compliance with relevant labor laws and other legal obligations related to employment, such as health care benefit regulations.

4. Maintaining regular engagement and feedback

Regular engagement with stakeholders ensures that the headcount report is accurate and provides actionable insights. The process usually involves gathering feedback on report formats, data presentation, timing of updates, or additional metrics that aids business planning and decision-making. 

5. Enabling change management

Since headcount reporting provides an overview of the current workforce and trends, it plays a vital role in change management by facilitating change initiatives, such as corporate restructuring and strategic pivots. However, the way this information is communicated impacts the success of these changes. Clear communication fosters trust among stakeholders by explaining the rationale behind significant workforce changes and reduces resistance to new strategies and policies.

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What metrics should your headcount dashboard include?

Headcount reporting dashboards make communicating with stakeholders easy. While every company's headcount reporting dashboard will reflect its key strategic priorities, there are a few foundational metrics that every headcount reporting dashboard needs to have to be effective.   

1. Total headcount

Total headcount is the total and exact number of employees that are currently working for your organization. This is not just required for compliance but also to better plan for growth. By comparing headcounts in different periods, leaders can identify patterns and better plan their staffing levels. 

2. Headcount composition

Headcount composition is the departmental distribution of your workforce. Understanding this helps leaders identify opportunities and trends, such as where certain teams might be understaffed or if the ratio between revenue-generating teams and support functions is optimal.

3. Headcount start and end lists

Start and end lists detail all employee information, from when they join to their exits. These lists should include each employee’s name, position, department, employment type (full-time, part-time, or contract), salary details and adjustments, and tenure. 

This data helps leaders understand turnover patterns within specific departments and evaluate the effectiveness of onboarding processes and retention strategies, and is also considered as the starting point for headcount reconciliation. 

4. Headcount changes

This metric tracks the movement of employees within the organization during a specific period—usually at the end of the month—and shows how many people are added to or removed from your headcount composition. This includes new hires joining the company, internal transfers between departments, and employees leaving the organization. 

5. Average tenure

To calculate average tenure, first we need to calculate each employee’s tenure. You can use the formula below, which includes the employee’s start date. Note that not all companies include an employee’s start date in their tenure calculations. If yours doesn’t, you would simply omit the “+1” from the formula.

Once you’ve calculated the tenure for each employee, you simply add them all together and divide by the total number of employees to get the average.

6. Employee retention percentage

Employee retention rate is used to measure an organization’s ability to retain a stable workforce over a defined period (typically monthly or quarterly). 

It is tracked by taking into account the number of employees in your organization at the start of the analysis period and how many of those original employees remain at the end of the same period. A higher retention rate usually indicates better employee satisfaction and can mean lower recruitment costs.

7. Employee turnover rate

Employee turnover rate measures the percentage of your total workforce that have left, either voluntarily or involuntarily, during a specific period. It is usually calculated on a monthly basis. 

This metric provides HR leaders and finance teams with insights into management efficiency, training and onboarding effectiveness, and employee satisfaction and attrition.

The insight your employee turnover rate provides regarding attrition can be particularly useful to leaders, provided they have a good understanding of voluntary versus involuntary departures. 

The main difference between voluntary and involuntary departures is who decides to end the employment relationship. Understanding whether employees choose to leave the company (voluntary) or when the organization decides to end employment (involuntary) provides valuable insights into the work environment, employee satisfaction and retention. 

High voluntary departure rates might signal employee engagement challenges, while high involuntary rates could indicate hiring mismatches or performance management issues.

In order to gain these insights, your headcount analysis should include data on how many exits were voluntary vs involuntary and ideally, any information you have regarding the  reasons for each employee’s exit.

8. Revenue per employee 

Revenue per employee or annual recurring revenue (ARR) per full-time equivalent (FTE) measures the average profit generated from each employee and also tracks workforce productivity and efficiency. This metric helps evaluate how effectively headcount investments translate into revenue growth along with industry benchmarks. 

Include a headcount walk in your dashboard for deeper insights 

Headcount walk, also known as employee movement, represents the “movement” of employees into, within, and out of an organization. This includes hiring and onboarding, transfers or promotions, and exit or termination. 

Regular headcount walk reporting enables business leaders to keep track of their talent so they can more effectively respond to disruptions in employee retention, resource allocation, and hiring. 

A key metric linked to headcount walk is active headcount, which is nothing but the total number of employees, including new hires and internal transfers into a department, at an organization during a specific period. This metric, however, does not include any transfers out of a department or employee attrition.

Let's understand this formula better with an example.

Let's say your company starts January with 500 employees (opening headcount). During the month:

• You hire 20 new people.
• You also have 15 approved open positions you're actively recruiting for.
• 5 employees transfer into the sales department from other teams.
• 3 employees transfer out of sales to other departments.
• 10 people leave the company.

The "expected to hire" variable adds a forward-looking element to headcount reporting. It highlights approved open positions. Once filled, these positions move from "expected to hire" to "new hires" in the calculation.

Headcount movement reporting, together with the active headcount metric, enables business leaders to answer key questions such as:

• Are we growing or shrinking overall?
• How quickly are we filling open positions?
• Are the payroll expenses positive or negative?
• Are certain departments experiencing more turnover than others?
• Is our internal mobility (transfers between departments) at healthy levels?

Streamline your headcount reporting with Drivetrain

Headcount reporting requires both strategic understanding and the right reporting software. Traditional spreadsheet-based planning makes it difficult to maintain accurate headcount data as the process is manual and prone to errors and also more time consuming. 

However, modern financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions like Drivetrain streamline  the process of headcount reporting by reducing manual effort that spreadsheets require to get your data compiled for analysis and improve the accuracy of insights and forecasting in real time. 

Drivetrain is a strategic, third-generation headcount planning software that offers a robust set of FP&A features that:

• Seamlessly integrate all the different systems with the data you need for headcount analysis, planning, and reporting, automatically consolidating the data into a single source of truth. 
• Automate your headcount walk calculations, headcount analysis, and reconciliations.
• Allows you to track employee movements and positions in real time. 
• Automatically track key metrics and helps to visualize headcount trends with dynamic interactive dashboards for more effective analysis and communication. 
• Perform scenario analysis and variance analysis to support more accurate workforce planning and forecasting. 
• Ensure that only the right people have access to confidential information and sensitive reports with fine-grained role-based access control.

With Drivetrain’s with a familiar, spreadsheet-like user interface, finance and non-finance users both can spend more time on data analysis to identify any opportunities and gaps, as well as mitigate any bottlenecks.

‍Learn more about how Drivetrain can transform your headcount planning and reporting to, helping you maintain your budgets and stay on track with your long-term strategy.