Planning headcount is a crucial aspect of workforce management and a key tool for HR teams. Forecasting your headcount allows HR and finance teams to plan for a number of eventualities. Using software to plan and forecasting allows for faster, and more accurate planning – but choosing which software tool to invest in can be a complex task.
Here’s our shortlist of the best workforce planning software tools for HR teams in 2024:
Abacum
Rippling
Anaplan
Workday Adaptive Planning
Planful
ChartHop
Runn
Deel
What is Workforce and Headcount Planning?
HR and people teams at both scaling mid-market businesses and global enterprises undertake workforce or headcount planning. While this is a task usually undertaken by resource management teams, planning organisation headcount and organising human capital is inherently connected with a business’ finances and strategic goals.
The headcount, or the number of people, who work in an organisation is planned in advance to ensure teams will have the resources, training, experience and management they need to achieve their strategic goals. Conducting this prevents costly issues such as over or understaffing and lets managers know in advance when their teams will need to grow.
What is the difference between Workforce Planning and Management?
Workforce management is an all-encompassing HR discipline for managing the entire workforce of an organisation. It includes responsibilities such as analyzing and allocating resources and people within the business, determining talent gaps, ensuring legal compliance for employees and the employer.
Workforce planning, on the other hand, is a specific task within the larger management discipline that focuses on planning headcount numbers, allocation and resources. This task allows for the business to create a headcount plan that will ensure alignment with the company’s strategic goals in the near and far future. Our headcount planning template provides a simple tool to plan your teams.
How Can Software Tools Help with Headcount Planning?
Utilising software for headcount planning can help achieve better and more accurate planning:
The right software tool can combine and calculate headcount needs with forecasted financial performance, allowing for planning that is more closely aligned with the business’ ability to meet strategic objectives.
It can also incorporate other financial planning facets to create a centralised planning operation with better visibility and accountability.
Automation functions in headcount planning software allow for quicker and more efficient planning, freeing up your team to perform other tasks.
The forecasting and predictive planning data functions of software tools are more accurate and less prone to errors than human calculations, reducing the number of mistakes and giving decision makers more confidence in the utilised data to fill skill gaps and calculate
How Did We Review Headcount Planning Software?
We’ve created our ranking based on our expertise in HR and financial planning, personal experience with the platforms we have ranked, and ratings from software evaluation platform G2. We’ve used each platform and evaluated it based on why it stands out, key features, and what to look for, then weighted that with the rating it has on G2 to give it a wholistic ranking that reflects how it compares to competing software platforms.
The rankings are largely made up of two types of tools – financial planning and forecasting tools that have headcount planning and forecasting capabilities, and comprehensive resource management tools which include planning functionality.
The 8 Best Financial Reporting Tools
Abacum
Why it stands out: Abacum provides a centralized planning platform for both financial and business resources, allowing HR teams to combine their operational data with finance information inside a single operational environment. The Abacum software is also built for collaborative use by multiple teams, with the functionality for multiple users to view and work on one document at the same time. This allows your headcount plans to be viewed, amended and shared easily in one place across your entire business. Meanwhile, robust access controls mean that only the right people see your plans.
Key features: Alongside Abacum’s excellent collaborative working functionality, it also excels in forecasting and planning. Using real-time financial and operational data, the software can accurately model future performance and use this to inform headcount and resource allocation planning. Plus, it’s suite of integrations allow it to fit seamlessly into the tech-stack your HR or People team currently uses.
What to look out for: Abacum is the perfect software tool for scaling mid-market businesses who are suffering from having their workforce planning as a siloed, manual process. Abacum allows your HR team to conduct quicker headcount planning that is better aligned with your finance team and strategic business goals. Abacum also provides quick customer support and new feature integration. One of its only drawbacks is that it is not best-suited for enterprise-level businesses.
G2 rating: 4.8/5
Website: Abacum
Rippling
Why it stands out: Rippling is a collective platform for HR, IT and some aspects of financial management with an emphasis on managing the entire employee lifecycle. Similar to Abacum, Rippling’s centralised platform allows for more efficient workforce management.
Key features: It handles IT device and software access, compliance management, time tracking for employee tasks, as well as accounting facets through payroll management.
What to look out for: Ideal for small to mid-market businesses, Rippling’s user interface is one of the best amongst competitors despite issues with it’s mobile app which makes it easy to learn and familiarise yourself with. Rippling’s financial management features do sometimes cause issues with its lack of integration facilities with other pieces of accounting software.
G2 rating:4.8/5
Website: Rippling
Anaplan
Why it stands out: Anaplan is a predominantly FP&A tool which handles headcount planning as a statistically model and plan headcount and flag future issues before they arise.
Key features: Data modeling is Anaplan’s core function, and it is able to apply this functionality to headcount planning, with a patented calculation engine behind its calculation facilities.
What to look out for: It’s in-memory processing capabilities can handle large quantities of data which makes it ideal for enterprise level businesses. But this same complexity makes it difficult to learn for new users and hard to implement into existing tech stacks. Small and mid-market businesses also find it hard to get their money’s worth out of the platform.
G2 rating:4.6
Website: Anaplan
Workday Adaptive Planning
Why it stands out: An all-encompassing software tool specialised for enterprise-level businesses, with functionality that extends to headcount forecasting and planning. As an all-around platform with lots of functions, Workday can be a great solution for enterprise businesses that need a solution for both financial and operational teams.
Key features: Workday provides a forecasting capability for headcount planning, with collaborative features that allow input from other teams with the capability to bring budgets and strategic objectives into the planning process.
What to look out for: As a tool that covers all areas, Workday is fantastic and has a huge number of integrations. However, it is not an overly specialised tool and is only cost-effective for enterprise businesses – meaning it can feel clunky for small to medium businesses.
G2 rating:4.3/5
Website: Workday Adaptive Planning
Planful
Why it stands out: Planful stands out for its ability to create bespoke strategic models for planning and forecasting, with headcount plans that can be adjusted and tailored to market changes. Primarily a piece of financial software, Planful enables cross-collaboration between HR and finance teams.
Key features: Its HR functions include both headcount planning and workforce cost management, as well as its suite of financial forecasting tools. Planful also has well-renowned data security and processing security features.
What to look out for: An easy to scale platform with good collaborative and modelling features as well as effective cross- platform integrations. However, its financial specialty may leave HR teams feeling lost while first using the platform – creating difficulties when they first create headcount plans.
G2 rating:4.3/5
Website: Planful
ChartHop
Why it stands out: A platform that is focused on transparency and collaboration within businesses, ChartHop’s People Operations Platform is a workforce management tool for HR teams that offers a unified data and accountability source for multiple teams.
Key features: ChartHop excels in aligning teams from across an organisation with a single HR platform to unite their entire tech stack. In line with their emphasis on accessibility, there are lots of in-built integrations and the user interface is easy and friendly to use.
What to look out for: As a new and still-growing platform, ChartHop lacks functionality for the headcount forecasting and modeling capabilities that many competitors can boast.
G2 rating:4.3/5
Website: ChartHop
Runn
Why it stands out: Runn is another large workforce and resource management platform with an effective forecasting suite. While its standout features are for real-time project management and people tracking, its ability to forecast human resource needs and bottlenecks makes it deserving of a place on this list.
Key features: Runn has a high-level view of resource use as well as the capability to run scenario analysis and workload distribution visualisation which can be applied to workforce plans.
What to look out for: Ideal for small, agile teams who need to pivot quickly and conduct their resource planning and workforce management in one place, not ideal for mid-market or large businesses who need a comprehensive solution with true forecasting capabilities.
G2 rating:4.5/5
Website: Runn
Deel
Why it stands out: A HR platform designed for large and enterprise level businesses for workforce management from a single platform. Deel’s emphasis primarily in talent acquisition and onboarding, and then employee tracking and support, but there are customisable workflows for measuring performance.
Key features: The capability to measure employee performance is key for headcount planning. Deel’s standout feature is its ability to provide support for international or multinational businesses.
What to look out for: While you can measure current workforce performance and output, there is no specific functionality for true headcount forecasting which narrows its ability to assist fully with headcount and workforce planning.
G2 rating:4.8/5
Website: Deel
Choosing Software that is Right for Your Business and Teams
While this ranking provides an overall assessment of these platforms, you should always make your decision based on your business situation and requirements. If you’re a small or mid-market business, then Abacum is ideal for you – but large enterprise businesses will have their business and workforce planning needs better met by an enterprise platform like Workday.
