HR Metrics for Finance and Administration

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been deep-diving into the key metrics in HR. Which interesting data does the HR sector have available? And how to employ it in a clever way for decision-making?

Before we get to our last topic in this series, let’s recap what we’ve discussed so far. We looked into 4 specific domains of HR, namely:

1. Staffing & employment metrics: how to plan your workforce more efficiently?
2. Recruitment metrics: how to better find and attract new talent?
3. Training & development metrics: how to efficiently train an employee’s skillset?
4. Employee well-being metrics: how to improve employee retention & satisfaction?

To finish this series, let’s look further into 1 topic that applies across all of these domains: finance & administration. Many parts of HR come with a financial side and an administrative load. It’s important for any company to keep a close eye on this, and to have a good oversight.

You’ll find this article most useful if you’re involved in the following processes.

• Payroll
• Contracts & administration
• HR automation

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How to start reporting on HR administration?

How many hours of overtime were booked this month? What about vacation days or sick leave? How does all of this affect the organization financially? In terms of compensation: how are salaries different across job functions and seniority? How do they differ for FTE’s and contractors? Are there any abnormalities to be solved? Keeping track of employee absences can be a headache, especially when juggling overtime, vacations, sick leave, and other paid time off (PTO). A PTO calculator helps a lot, as it allows employees to easily monitor their remaining PTO balance, while giving HR a clear picture of upcoming staff absences and potential scheduling needs.

As a fact, there are lots of administrative processes in HR, often directly related to the payroll. So, when your personnel cost goes up, you’ll want to know why and how this happened.

Therefore, it’s crucial to keep track of the administrative level. A good insight into your HR processes will help you track down where potential risks or problems rise for the organization. Utilizing a salary income calculator can aid in understanding the financial implications of various compensation structures and adjustments, similar to an hourly to salary calculator.

Luckily, there are many tools out there nowadays that help companies better manage their HR administration. For example, platforms like Officient even have integrations with payroll providers, which brings about a positive change: all the HR related admin data is centralized within the HR platform you’re using.

Having all that data is a good start. But it leads to 2 further questions:

• Out of all the available data, what do we want to keep track of?
• How do we present it in a visual report?

List of HR metrics for finance and administration to track

With the amount of data literally increasing by the minute, you can analyze almost anything. So before you dive into the HR data, make sure to answer this question first: “Which information is important to my department?”

Every company typically has a set of goals, or struggles they want to do away with. Make sure to align the KPIs you choose to the goals your company has set. Here are some more tips on how to define KPIs.

Now, you need to start somewhere, right? Therefore, we made this list of basic HR admin metrics, which you can use as a starting point to set more specific KPIs.

• Work hours
• Overtime
• Absence
• Gross salary cost
• Net salary
• Vacation days

You can map these metrics against different dimensions to get to know more about your business:

• Per employee
• Per contract type
• Per type of compensation
• By seniority
• Evolution over time

Creating an HR dashboard

Once you’ve selected your KPIs, you’ll get the most out of them if they are presented in a visual, up-to-date report. Real-time dashboards can be a good solution.

Are you already using software for HR administration? If you’re lucky, it might already offer a form of reporting inside the platform itself. If you’re still looking for the right tool, this type of embedded analytics can really make the difference when making your final choice.

Play around with the embedded dashboard below, to discover how it works.

How to do data-driven HR?

Now that we’ve come to the end of this series, let’s do a recap. What are the 4 steps to a data-driven HR strategy?

1. Assess: Which HR tools are we using? Which data do they have available? If possible, we recommend picking tools that allow you to export data, or have an embedded analytics component available.
2. Define: Out of the available metrics, decide which ones are crucial to your business. Define KPIs that align to your business goals.
3. Analyze: Build dashboards that visualize your KPIs, or get a process in place to use your reports proactively.
4. Take action: Based on your insights, define actions within your organization to optimize the parts of your business that need improvement.

That’s it, you’re ready to start doing data-driven HR. Good luck!

Are you active in HRtech, looking to offer this type of insights inside your platform? Get a demo from our product experts, and we’ll show you how easily it’s done!