Trace Takes on Headcount Management

By Justin Johnson.
Updated Jul 27, 2021

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) July 27, 2021 - Trace, the service desk for finance, is making Trace Headcount Management available this fall for early access customers. 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 headcountactive, requested, and openin 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. Its hard because headcount by nature is a moving target, no one uses the same system, and its 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 dont have that option.

Headcount decisions will only get more complicated with the Big Quit' that is expected as the pandemic winds down. The US Quits Rate is already skyrocketing. The 2.7% turnover rate in April (most recently available) was a five-year high. That means nearly a third of the workforce may turnover in the next 12 months. According to CompTIA, the leading non-profit trade association for the tech industry, hiring growth is expected to continue to increase. Between turnover and hiring growth, pressure will increase on the manual tracking and reconciliations that are currently used for headcount management.

According to Mike Gonazalez, CEO and co-founder of Trace, Finance leaders should act now to prepare for the post-pandemic hiring situation. With a single source of headcount truth plus hiring workflow management, they can reclaim hundreds of hours of time and sync systems automatically so finance, HR and talent can quickly align around decisions. With this tool, 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 its mission to help people collaborate on the financial decisions that matter to the health of the business. Join the waitlist for headcount management here. And to learn more about Trace, contact Trace at sales[at]tracehq.com.