Overview of Workforce Planning

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Workforce Planning is a standalone planning tool for modeling employee costs and workforce changes over time.

To use Workforce Planning, you need a Budgets & Forecasts license.

How it works

You set up a plan with the measures, dimensions, and benefits you need, add or import your employees, then forecast changes such as pay reviews, promotions, transfers, expansions or restructures.

When you publish the plan, the salary and benefit values are projected into a dedicated Workforce database. From there, you can analyze workforce data on its own or bring it into a Budgets & Forecasts workbook to drive expense accounts.

You enter costs into a workforce plan as annual values. When you publish the plan, the tool spreads these annualized values into daily transactions in the database.

Getting started

Before you use Workforce Planning, ensure you read and understand the following pages:

• Workforce Planning foundations: Understand perpetual plans, temporal cells, and annualized values before you build a workforce plan.
• Workforce Planning access and database permissions: Understand how database permissions and restrictions protect sensitive information in a workforce plan.
• Key differences from Headcount Planning: If you use the Headcount tab in Budgets & Forecasts, compare the setup, data modeling, and workforce analysis to Workforce Planning.
• Workforce Planning FAQs: Read through the answers to some common questions asked.

You can then get to work:

• Take a tour of Workforce Planning
• Create a workforce plan

  • Add employees
  • Manage employees
  • Model employees who don't receive an annual salary
  • Publish a workforce plan
• Use the workforce plan data (includes export the plan)

  • Analyze workforce data
  • Planning tab
• Delete a workforce plan

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Limitations

Workforce Planning is designed to replace the existing Headcount planning functionality and introduces several new capabilities, such as custom dimensions, measure and properties, and effective-dated changes. However, some functionality is still under development.

Security and access

Access is currently managed at the workforce plan level.

You can control who can access a plan, but you cannot yet restrict users to specific employees, divisions, locations, or other subsets of workforce data.

Workflow management

Workforce Planning does not currently include workflow features such as:

• Assigning employees or departments to specific users.
• Approval workflows — review and sign-off processes.
• Locking completed sections of a plan. Any user with permission to edit a plan can update its data.

Employee costing

The initial release is optimized for salaried employees.

Support for more advanced workforce modeling, such as hourly employees, variable work schedules, and seasonal staffing patterns, is planned for a future release.

Benefits configuration

Benefits are currently defined at the plan level.

Location-specific or region-specific calculations, such as different payroll tax rates by state or country, are not yet available.

Resource planning

Workforce Planning currently focuses on employee planning only.

Additional planning models, such as fixed assets, leases, subscriptions, and capital expenditure, are planned as part of a broader resource planning roadmap.

Cash vs accruals basis

Published workforce plans currently generate accrual-based workforce costs.

Cash-flow timing scenarios, such as monthly, weekly, or quarterly payment schedules, are planned for a future release.