Workforce planning ensures organizations have the necessary human capital to thrive in a competitive landscape. Adapt to changing environments, attract and retain top talent, and control labor costs. Download the template.
What's included:
- Outputs tab: Review headcount data in an easy-to-digest format based on inputs into Cube scenarios.
- Workforce Plan tab: Model and plan current and future employee expenses. Detailed instructions and Excel comments are included to assist with assumptions. Your company roster can be pasted into this format with ease.
- Drivers tab: This tab controls all dropdowns in the file herein.
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Highlighted Yellow Cells: Cells that are highlighted yellow denote that there is a comment. These Excel comments help you and your team navigate some of the detailed aspects of the Workforce plan and can be removed after the template uses your company's data.
- Spreadsheet Formulas: This template was pre-formatted with spreadsheet formulas for ease of use. Formulas include sum, v-lookup, if-statements, date, and month.
What you'll need for this template:
- Payroll roster
- Dimensions export for the Drivers tab driver or Cube Dimension page pulled up in Workspace.
Formatting and fields are entirely up to you. Feel free to take or leave any suggestions to make this template maximally beneficial to your team.
However, for your Spreadsheet App to recognize the dimension members in this sheet to fetch and publish, all tabs must be updated to match your Cube dimension member names. See the sections below to learn how to connect your spreadsheet to Cube.
Unsure about a column or row in this template? Yellow cells highlight areas with comments that call out important information to help you use this template successfully.
Connect the Outputs tab to Cube
The outputs tab gives you a payroll model view by calculating ending headcount and payroll by department, in addition to allowing users to toggle by a specific department and see headcount totals for salaries, taxes, benefits, and ending headcount by quarter.
- Update each department to your organization's naming conventions
- Update the dates based on the year and quarters you'd like to see
- Register each range and name it accordingly
- Move on to Cubifying the workforce plan to fetch data to this tab
Connect the Workforce plan tab to Cube
Model and plan current and future employee expenses using your company roster, which can be copied and pasted into this template. Detailed instructions and Excel comments are included to assist with assumptions.
1. Update the Drivers tab.
Drivers for Selections: Using your Cube dimensions export or pulling up your Dimensions screen, update the Drivers tab for your dimensions and their relevant parent dimension members. This helps Cube know what data to pull and how to filter and arrange it.
Workforce Drivers: This spreadsheet includes Employee Level. Some organizations level their employees based on title, experience, etc. Your Company can determine an estimated salary based on level and import their actual salary from your HRIS:
This template also accounts for FICA & SUTA, including Rate, Cap, and Payout Cap. SUTA rates can vary depending on industry and company priorities. Learn more here.
Finally, update the Drivers for inputs regarding your desired terminology and plan years.
2. Update the named ranges used in the Workforce Plan
In your Workforce Plan tab, update the Drivers from C3:L9. These drivers are used to see variation and allow non-Cube users to see which data was fetched from Cube.
3. Update hidden columns in the Workforce Plan
Expand column J and update your filter dimensions.
To publish data, all dimensions must correlate to a child dimension member.
To automatically account for this every time you're working in the spreadsheet, update the column headers and relevant rows for the dimensions that aren't important to the plan.
When pulling in a scenario, be mindful of write-protected dimension members. For actual data or locked scenarios, create a copy of your scenario as a v2 to allow alterations on publish.
Add additional columns if you have more dimensions in your Cube than the three provided in the template.
4. Update additional dimension members & attributes
Dimension members
Based on the changes you made to your Drivers tab, update the dimension members to match your dimension member nomenclature.
Dimension Locations: Column F (Department), W (Salary Wages), DX (FTEs). Remember, these columns may have changed if filters were added or removed in Step 3.
Since data is stored at the lowest dimension member, avoid citing formulas, tags, or parent dimension members.
For example, in the template, the dimension member Salary Wages helps tell Cube which dimension to cite and store data.
Any dimension members that correlate to a formula in Cube, and would need to be changed to a child dimension, like Salary Detail to publish data correctly. If you're not sure which dimension members are formulas, go to the Dimensions page in your Workspace to verify. Learn more about formulas in Cube.
Attributes
Unlike dimension members, attributes are not used to analyze or manipulate data. Instead, they serve as helpful information associated with each entry.
In this template, columns J-T serve as attributes and include Employee ID, Title, Employee, Name, Level, Est: salary, Bonus, Annual Salary & Bonus, 401k% %, and Work State.
Customize the attributes based on your preferences, removing any that don't apply or ones you're not interested in using.
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Register your attributes
In the Spreadsheet App, under Publish, select Set Attributes, then use your cursor to highlight the column headers containing the names of your attributes and click Mark for Attributes.
You'll receive a green confirmation message that your attributes have been set.
- Remove or add any additional information you'd like to work with before registering the range.
Learn more about attributes.
Fetch and publish data with your template
After you've registered the ranges, you can fetch the relevant data and populate your spreadsheet with additional information to publish to Cube.
With your data published, your Outputs tab is now ready for fetching!