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All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
All-in-one HR platform · v2.0
14-day free trial · No credit cardhello@HrMagix.com
Leadership questions about people tend to arrive one at a time and urgently: how many people do we have, why is payroll up, who left last quarter. Answering each from scratch produces numbers that differ slightly every time, and the next meeting is spent reconciling them.
The remedy is a standing pack: a small number of reports, produced on the same day each month, from the same definitions. This guide sets out which reports belong in it and what each needs to answer. Two of them, headcount and attrition, have guides of their own.
01
The single biggest source of problems in HR reporting is that two people mean different things by the same word. Does headcount include interns and contractors? Is someone serving notice still in it? Is attrition counted on resignation date or last working day?
Write a one-page definitions sheet and get it signed off by whoever chairs the leadership meeting. Then every report uses it, and a disagreement about a number becomes a discussion about a definition, which can be settled once.
02
These cover almost every recurring question. Not every company needs all of them, and some will add one specific to their business, such as utilisation for a services firm or shift coverage for a plant.
03
A number on its own invites the question of whether it is good or bad. A number with its movement explained answers it. Payroll cost went up: by how much from joiners, how much from revisions, how much from arrears or overtime. Headcount fell: which teams, which reasons.
Build the bridge into the report rather than preparing it after the question is asked. It is the part leadership actually reads.
Watch for itAvoid comparing your figures with external benchmarks unless you know exactly how they were defined. An attrition figure from a survey that counts differently from you is not a comparison, it is a source of false alarm or false comfort.
04
A leadership pack should fit on a few pages. Put the summary first, the movement explained second, and keep the employee-level detail in an appendix or in the system, available when somebody asks.
Be careful about what goes into a pack that circulates widely. Department-level salary totals can identify individuals in a small team. Combine figures where the group is small, and keep individual compensation out of anything that gets forwarded.
05
Fix the day the pack is produced, after payroll closes, and produce it from the same source each month. A report rebuilt by hand each month drifts in definition without anyone deciding it should.
If your HRMS has standard reports or dashboards that match your definitions, use them. Where they do not, decide whether to change the definition or build the report, rather than living with two answers.
Every guide ends here rather than in a summary. If a line below is not true yet, that is the next thing to do.
Most leadership teams want headcount, hiring, attrition, payroll cost, leave and attendance, and statutory compliance status. Each should explain the movement from the previous month, not only the current figure.
Usually because of definitions: whether contractors and interns are counted, whether notice-period employees are included, and which date counts as a joining or leaving. Agree one definitions sheet and use it in both places.
Total payroll cost, yes. Individual compensation, generally not in a pack that circulates. Watch out for small departments, where a total can reveal one person's salary.
Short enough to be read before the meeting. A summary, the explained movements and an appendix of detail is a structure that works for most companies.
The checklist above is generic by necessity. Bring your own structures, states and rota and we will tell you which lines are already true and which are not.
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