Why CFOs Should Be More Involved in Workforce Analytics
You’re the center of your company’s finances. You shoulder the weight of managing business analytics for investments, operational risks, and the cost of labor management. You probably have a solid human resources team working right beside you to ensure smooth time entry and payouts, hiring and retention, and even the well-being of your most valuable resource: people.
Robust workforce analytics reports allow CFOs to access accurate, timely, and detailed return-on-investment evidence for finance and operations decisions as well as develop insight for future workforce planning.
Understanding Your Workforce
Regardless of industry, it would not be much of a risk to wager that your largest expense is labor related, whether it is the direct payout of people hours worked, the investment in employee perks and benefits, or the costs of recruiting, hiring, and training. Having data insights into your workforce is a powerful solution to recognizing costly labor problems by exploring three key areas:
- Recruitment: Who are your people? How do you know if you have the right capacity in place for your organization’s current and future projects? While HR is going to continue to work their magic in the fine details, it’s important that you know when it’s time to have them ramp up the recruitment process.
- Retention: Why do employees leave, and how much is it costing your company? According to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace, employee unhappiness results in absenteeism and lost productivity that costs American enterprises over $450 billion per year.
- Management: How efficient — and accurate — are the systems in place for your current employees? As CFO, your ability to manage finance and operations depends on ensuring that your people are compensated correctly, trained appropriately, and recognized meaningfully.
Getting the Most out of Workforce Analytics
Smart business software with good data reporting takes much of the guesswork out of budgeting and forecasting for your company’s success.
With good data insights, you can make smarter talent decisions that increase productivity and reduce wasteful spending. CFOs can use employee time and expense data to bring strategic insight to the executive decision-making table in these ways:
- Identifying how to lower the cost of hiring and retaining a productive workforce
- Matching compensation, benefits, and other perks and rewards with the organization’s values and financial picture
- Targeting how to best use data from HR programs to capture ROI most effectively
- Detecting potential improvements across the workforce in order to streamline processes and reduce wasted people hours
- Increasing customer and employee relationships by reducing time spent on operational tasks
- Ensuring that time, cost, and project accounting data is collected more accurately in less time
For example, by reviewing time entry data reports that compare billable versus non-billable hours, you can determine if certain non-billable tasks are costing your company more than they’re worth. These may include:
- Writing proposals
- Collecting payment
- Signing paperwork
- Tracking time entries
- Scheduling meetings
- Creating marketing materials
If your report shows that a significant number of your potential billable hours are being spent on these kinds of crucial but flexibly assigned tasks, you can consider the cost of increasing administrative support against the cost of the missed billable hours revenue.
Why Journyx?
The only thing that outweighs the amount of people counting on you is the amount of information you need access to. Perhaps even more importantly, you need to know that the people you are depending on to help you make the big decisions have access to equally good data that is easy to read and up to date.
Journyx allows you to access your most important reports quickly — whenever you want, however you want — and track project time and expense data in dynamic dashboards you can configure to show the metrics most relevant to the issue on your plate right then.
Journyx Reportlink, which provides dynamic graphical reporting for powerful data analysis in both Microsoft Excel and Power BI, is powerful enough to provide the kind of custom reporting you want, tailored to your specific settings and security needs.
For more information about how Journyx can support your organization with workforce analytics to help you make the best finance and operations decisions, schedule a customized demo online or call (800) 755-9878.
Let’s Get Started. Book a Demo Today.
Journyx helps you track time for projects, payroll, and more. Learn how Journyx can help you use time to your advantage in your business.