Trace, the service desk for finance, is making Trace Headcount Management available this fall for early access customers: the waitlist opens today.
Headcount accounts for 50-70% of business spending, according to OPEXEngine, and impacts 70-90% of spending. As business leaders know, headcount decisions drive product development and growth as well as margins. And the people invested in these decisions come from every corner of the business, from the CEO to the hiring manager. Yet as critical and massive as this cost category is, business intelligence about headcount is still commonly locked up in spreadsheets. With finance teams spending up to 70% of their time maintaining those spreadsheets, the amount of trapped value sitting within the finance team and in those documents is staggering.
Trace Headcount Management will offer finance, HR, and hiring managers a single source of headcount truth to replace multiple, manually maintained spreadsheets. Trace will integrate with most HR and recruiting solutions, and automatically marry the positions that are either filled or in-recruiting with the positions that were planned. Customers will access the tool within the team-friendly Trace finance service desk, where budget owners can make and manage position requests and see headcount targets plus all their committed headcount—active, requested, and open—in one place. A unique timeline view across either positions or people will make it extremely intuitive for stakeholders to not only visualize how positions move from opened to filled, but how people transition over time through the phases of being hired, promoted, transferred and/or terminated.
“You need a trifecta of finance, talent, and HR to stay aligned on headcount,” says Lisa To, Head of FP&A Transformation at LinkedIn. “It’s hard because headcount by nature is a moving target, no one uses the same system, and it’s a topic that gets C-level scrutiny. It ultimately falls to finance to spend hundreds of hours to bring it all together with spreadsheets. When I was at Facebook, it was actually better to build our own in-house headcount management solution. Most businesses don’t have that option.”
Trace enables finance leaders to reclaim hundreds of hours of time, sync systems automatically, and quickly align with HR and talent around headcount decisions. Finance professionals can now establish processes, remove chaos from hiring operations, and track moment-in-time changes to improve execution against budget targets.
With this solution, Trace is furthering our mission to help people collaborate on the financial decisions that matter to the health of the business. Join the waitlist for Trace Headcount Management here.
