Every company needs the following data for its personnel cost planning

Proper personnel cost planning is important so that you can always keep an eye on your employee wages and costs, adjust your personnel budgets and plan for new personnel. We reveal why you should be careful with common tools for personnel cost planning and why you should not consider your personnel costs separately from your corporate planning.

That’s a no-go. HR Manager Tim can’t get the conversation with Robert and CEO Daniel out of his head. It was the third in a row. The topic is always the same: salary increases. Again and again, Tim hears Daniel’s monotone voice. “Our hands are tied. If we give you a raise now,” Daniel says as he shifts restlessly in his chair, “we’ll have to give it to everyone. And that’s beyond our capacity.” Paahh, Tim thinks angrily. Rightly so, Robert bursts with anger and declares us crazy. After all, we had promised him a salary increase after one year when he was hired. Daniel’s pretextual argument is a desperate attempt to cover up the essentials. That we simply miscalculated. Robert has every right to his raise. Not only is his performance highly satisfactory. No, we promised it to him contractually. But we can’t afford the raise. As he thinks this, Tim slaps his hands over his head. How could this happen?

We know how this could happen. What you are reading here is a classic phenomenon of isolated personnel cost planning in companies. What exactly do we mean by this?

Let’s start at the beginning:

What all is part of personnel cost planning?

When you hire new personnel, the joy is great. A newly filled position not only enriches your team, but also boosts your productivity. But what also comes your way are costs, and they should be well planned beforehand.

Let’s take a look at what personnel costs add up to:

• Monthly salaries
• Fringe benefits
• Christmas and vacation bonuses
• Insurance costs
• Travel expenses
• Overtime pay
• Salary increases
• Further training costs
• etc.

Do you keep track of these costs? Most companies use special tools to list all their personnel costs and use them to plan their personnel budget.

But beware: calculation errors like the one in Tim’s company will occur even if all personnel costs have been lined up neatly and tidily.

In order to know what personnel budget is available to you, now and in the years to come, you need crucial data that cannot be included in common tools, or only incompletely.

Do not despair! There is a simple solution for your planning.

How can I plan my personnel costs in advance?

Your personnel costs can fluctuate greatly. Depending on the labor market, new pay scales and employee turnover, they will sometimes be lower, sometimes higher.

To help you know how your company’s personnel costs will evolve over the coming years and whether you have the capacity to hire new staff, you should know the following factors:

• Consider how you want to structure your current and future salaries and salary increases, and what bonuses and additional benefits you want to offer your employees.
• Look at the development of your personnel costs in the past years
• Include your empirical values regarding internal and external influencing factors in your planning

Ideally, you should make an estimate based on past values and take new developments into account.

With the help of this data, you can carry out successful personnel cost planning.

What you do NOT know now, however, is whether the calculated costs fit into your overall budget. And this is where problems arise, as we see in Tim’s case.

Weigh whether your investment is worth it - in seconds.

No workforce planning works without it

Imagine you have planned your staffing budget and suddenly important customers or suppliers jump away from you. Not only does this have a fatal effect on your total expenditure, but it also means that you may no longer be able to implement the planned salary increases or new positions that need to be filled.

The prerequisite for realistic workforce planning is therefore a real-time overview of your total costs and revenues, taking into account current market developments. This is because personnel planning does not stand alone, but is always dependent on and a part of your overall planning. How can you ensure your personnel planning? Link your personnel cost planning with your operational, sales and financial planning in order to be able to draw conclusions about your personnel planning.

Particularly in VUCA times, companies are increasingly relying on holistic solutions to bring the data of the various departments into an overall view. This allows all departments to cooperate in the best possible way and strategic and personnel decisions to be made on the basis of a solid database.

Find the right software for your personnel cost planning

Whether for your cost planning, sales and revenue planning or your P&L planning. In a cloud software for business planning, all necessary and relevant data is collected without you having to spend extra effort. You don’t need to send your planning figures around, nor do you have to wait long for your data to produce analyses and reports. You can easily view your personnel costs and relate them to revenue, goals and your sales strategy with just a few clicks.

Be confident before you hire new staff.

Smart instead of hard - plan with QVANTUM

Make data-driven decisions

QVANTUM software is a secure, agile and straightforward enterprise data collection solution that you can immediately integrate into your current operations. You do not need any special knowledge for this.

Test our free version directly yourself!

What do you achieve with QVANTUM?

• Employee retention thanks to reliable salary plans
• Cost savings thanks to fast and agile planning
• Improved data quality thanks to automated data collection
• Solid data basis for reliable forecasts
• Uncomplicated collaboration between all departments
• Transparent real-time data from all departments