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Paylocity this week announced a new headcount planning offering for customers to support HR, TA, and finance teams with data-driven insights to better support workforce planning.
The move follows the HCM platform's December acquisition of Trace, a headcount and workforce planning software company.
The new offering marries new headcount planning capabilities with other Paylocity functionality, allowing HR leaders to better map out headcount needs with their colleagues in TA and finance.
“If you think about the connection to finance, the finance organization does a plan, either they have software to do it or they do it in Excel, and then they get files from HR to see how they’re doing versus their plan in a financial system,” Paylocity’s executive chairman Steven Beauchamp told HR Brew this week at the HR Tech 24 conference and expo in Las Vegas. “You can load that plan or create that plan in our software, and, because we have all of the promotions, changes, ads and the routing of approvals...we will do all your headcount planning throughout the year.”
Headcount planning is generally a finance-led operation. The company aims to transform headcount management for its customers into a in-real-time, cross-functional process, in which stakeholders across departments have access to the same data and insights in “a single source of truth” platform rather than in spreadsheets and siloed conversations between departments.
Paylocity’s new headcount planning solution helps with plan creation and management, automation, goal setting, real-time changes and approvals, and transparency between departments. Approvals for changes can be automatic with the new solution.
“If somebody terminates, you want approval because you need more salary to pay the next person, because you’ve got to increase the quality and the markets change, it’ll route it,” he said. “You’ll get the approval. It’ll automatically post into the recruiting software.”
Zoom out. The announcement comes as surveys indicate many companies are increasing their hiring throughout the remainder of the year, despite recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data that showed employers added fewer jobs than originally estimated this year.
Companies are also preparing their workforce plans and budgets for 2025, leveraging internal and external data to make the right decisions.
“We want to play where the integration of the data about the employee is so critical that we can deliver a better user experience, and we want to build those capabilities, and headcount planning is an example in finance,” Beauchamp said.