Workforce Planning

Managing payroll and other personnel expenses should be easy but it’s not. What’s the answer?

Personnel costs including payroll, payroll taxes and fringe benefits can represent 50% of a company’s expenditures – even more for service companies. At small to mid-sized businesses where cash flow is so important, it’s extra crucial to manage your personnel costs effectively, since inaccurate payroll data can result in over- or under-payment of payroll taxes.

But it’s not that easy to accurately track the costs of salaried, hourly, contract, part time and/or seasonal staff. Your fiscal year may not be the same as the tax year. And of course unplanned employee turnover throws your numbers out of whack.

Payroll and Benefits Planning

If you’re budgeting payroll expenditures in spreadsheets, you’re probably calculating tax and fringe benefits as a percentage, say 29% of total wages across the board. Spreadsheets aren’t flexible enough to reflect increasing health care costs (the amount and timing of the increase), merit increases, commission plans, overtime costs and other variables.

Changes must be made manually in every worksheet each time you want to run a report and conduct some analysis. Even a simple blanket change -- such as a 5% merit increase across the board – is labor-intensive.

Headcount Planning

Optimizing staffing levels for a project, department or the entire company can make an unprofitable business turn profitable, and be the key to improving key non-financial metrics like customer satisfaction. Building fluid headcount plans that reflect the business today and tomorrow, or running different headcount analyses to measure their impacts, is difficult in Excel to say the least.

On the Other Hand

With Budget and Planning Maestro’s payroll planning feature, you can:

  • Get a precise handle on how much your people are costing
  • Forecast payroll, taxes, and fringe benefits accurately so you don’t overpay taxes
  • Conduct headcount planning so you can consider the impact of personnel changes on growth, profitability and cash flow.

Budget Maestro / Planning Maestro features include:

  • Built-in wizards that guide your budgeting/forecasting of payroll expenses by position or individual employee
  • Ability to apply benefits flexibly, to any personnel item on a record level
  • Automatic headcount calculation based on FTE
  • Automatic FICA and SUTA calculations
  • Built-in menus for forecasting overtime, shift differential, and premium time
  • Automatic calculation of payroll taxes in the appropriate periods for non-calendar fiscal years