Headcount Planning
Headcount planning software that eliminates spreadsheets
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overview
The easiest way to share, track, and stick to your headcount plan
Share your hiring plan
Create and share plans across departments, aligning everyone.
Track your progress
View open roles, new hires, and costs in one place.
Stick to the plan
Use permissions and approvals to keep managers from going rogue.
Keep recruiting in sync
Give your talent acquisition team instant visibility into changes in your hiring plan throughout the year.
unified analytics
Know how you're pacing relative to plan at all times
Give every team visibility into headcount with reports that include new employees who haven't started. Track progress by location, start date, cost, and more.
Break down labor costs by plan, department, hiring manager, and more to stay on top of your budget.
Measure success to date by tracking target against total goals, attrition, retention, and transfers.
Create any report you want with Rippling Unified Analytics
Advanced approval management
Enforce your plan with (almost) zero effort
Automatically approve planned hires
Hires who meet your role criteria, like compensation band or level, will be automatically approved.
Require manual approval for off-plan hires
If a request deviates from plan, Rippling will route it through an approval chain predetermined by you.
fast-track hiring
Stay in sync with recruiting
You can optimize recruiting capacity with Workflow Studio. It’s easy to build workflows that keep your team up to date on approved roles and change requests.
Notify recruiting when headcount is approved
As soon as headcount gets approved, Rippling automatically notifies the recruiting team with each new role’s details, so they are able to begin sourcing candidates quickly for future needs.
Auto-update your Headcount Plan after a position is filled
When a position is filled, Rippling automatically updates your Headcount Plan, notifies recruiters, and sends a reminder to remove the job posting.
compensation bands
Control your headcount costs with compensation bands
Give everyone a single source of truth
Create and manage compensation bands for your current workforce while protecting sensitive data. Rippling automatically maps each employee to the right compensation band based on their role.
Prevent out-of-band compensation
Rippling enforces compensation bands during onboarding and flags out-of-band adjustments, so you can approve special cases, block others as needed, and keep headcount costs on plan.
Spot potential issues early
Rippling notifies stakeholders of changes, like when an employee’s compa-ratio drops because of a location change, or if an employee’s compensation is too high or too low.
ROlE-BASED PErmissions
Automatically give everyone visibility into the right bands
Rippling automatically gives everyone in your organization—whether they’re the head of human resources, a recruiter, or a hiring manager—visibility into the right compensation bands, without ever oversharing.
Workflow Studio
Customize workflows
to manage pay equity and more
Automated workflows help you stay ahead of the curve. For example, Rippling can help maintain pay equity by sending an alert whenever specific employee compa-ratios drop.
Built different
Analyze, automate, and orchestrate anything
Most "all-in-one" software consists of acquired systems. These modules are disconnected, so your business data is, too. Rippling takes a platform approach, building products on a single source of truth for all the business data related to employees. This rich, flexible data source unlocks a powerful set of capabilities.
Permissions
Automatically govern what each person in your company can see, do, and access.
Policies
Build custom policies that enforce your business’s unique rules and procedures.
Workflows
Automate virtually anything with hyper-custom triggers and advanced workflow actions.
Analytics
Make better decisions faster with real-time, unified data in an easy-to-use report builder.
FAQs
What does it mean to have headcount?
Headcount refers to the total number of employees in an organization. Open headcount refers to positions that have been approved as part of a hiring plan but not yet filled with actual employees.
What is headcount management and planning?
Headcount planning and management is the process of determining a company's headcount needs for the following year, allocating specific headcount to different departments, and tracking how the company performs against its plan. It is a cross-functional process that involves HR, Finance, Recruiting, and hiring managers.
Why is headcount planning important?
Headcount planning ensures that companies have the right talent with the right skills to meet their strategic initiatives and key metrics in the near and long term, while aligning business leaders around a plan to keep costs down. Without headcount planning, larger businesses run the risk of overhiring or hiring in a way that isn’t cost-effective.
How do you create a headcount plan?
Traditionally, businesses have managed headcount plans using spreadsheets. Because many different people are involved in the headcount process and the data related to headcount can be sensitive, this approach traditionally involves multiple spreadsheets. This can lead to challenges such as version control issues, lack of real-time visibility, and manual data entry errors. In Rippling, business leaders can start their headcount plan in a few simple clicks and adjust it collaboratively without ever seeing data they should not have access to.
What tools are available for effective headcount planning?
Effective headcount planning requires tools that move beyond traditional spreadsheets to offer real-time visibility, collaboration, and insightful analytics. Rippling unifies data across your HRIS and other systems with tools like:
- Consolidated workforce view: See all your current employees and planned hires in one centralized dashboard, eliminating the need for multiple spreadsheets and providing a clear overview of your current workforce and open roles.
- Automated updates: Rippling streamlines updates to your headcount plan as positions are filled or changes are approved, ensuring real-time accuracy and reducing manual data entry and the risk of outdated information.
- Headcount reports: Generate comprehensive headcount reports with key metrics like planned vs. actual headcount, labor costs, and progress towards business goals, enabling data-driven decision-making and accurate forecasting.
- Integration with other HR systems: Seamless integration with your HRIS and talent management systems, providing a unified view of your strategic workforce planning processes and ensuring alignment between hiring and your business strategy.