Use this article to understand what Workforce Planning does, who uses it, and how it connects headcount planning with Budget and Forecast workflows in Yarken.
Overview
What is Workforce Planning in Yarken?
Workforce Planning in Yarken helps finance, IT finance, and cost center teams plan people-related costs and connect those plans directly to budgets and forecasts.
Instead of maintaining headcount plans in spreadsheets and then manually converting them into financial budgets, users can plan headcount inside Yarken. The system calculates workforce cost from configured role rates and creates the related budget or forecast entries automatically.
Workforce Planning is designed for scenarios where people cost is a major part of the plan. This includes internal employees, contractors, vendors, delivery teams, project teams, shared service teams, and technology functions where role-based costs need to be planned across the financial year.
With Workforce Planning, you can:
-
Define workforce roles with annual rates (base compensation).
-
Plan employee or vendor headcount by month.
-
Assign workforce costs to cost centers, entities, and expense types.
-
Distribute costs across financial accounts using configured percentages.
-
Generate budget or forecast values automatically.
-
Review, submit, approve, and publish plans through the standard Yarken workflow.
Who should use Workforce Planning?
Workforce Planning is used by different roles depending on the stage of the planning process.
Admins
Admins configure the foundation for workforce planning. They define workforce roles, assign annual rates, and map those roles to financial accounts.
Budget Process Owners
Budget Process Owners create and manage budget or forecast plans. They add workforce entries, enter headcount, submit plans for review, and approve or reject submissions.
Budget Contributors or Cost Center Owners
Budget Contributors review assigned workforce plans for their cost centers. They can update assumptions where permitted, add comments, and submit the plan back for approval.
When should you use Workforce Planning?
Use Workforce Planning when your budget or forecast depends on headcount, role-based staffing, or vendor capacity.
Typical use cases include:
-
Planning the cost of engineering, operations, finance, support, or IT teams.
-
Forecasting the impact of hiring plans.
-
Planning vendor or contractor capacity for a project.
-
Estimating people cost for a cost center.
-
Comparing full-time employee and vendor staffing scenarios.
-
Aligning workforce costs with financial accounts and reporting dimensions.
Use standard Budget or Forecast line items for non-workforce expenses that do not depend on headcount or role-based cost logic.
Why Workforce Planning matters
People cost is often one of the largest areas of technology and operational spend. When headcount planning is handled outside the financial planning process, teams often lose visibility into the financial impact of hiring, vendor usage, and role changes.
Common problems include:
-
Different teams using different salary or vendor rate assumptions.
-
Manual calculations that are hard to audit.
-
Budget lines that do not match workforce plans.
-
Slow reconciliation between HR, finance, and cost center owners.
-
Limited visibility into the cost impact of hiring decisions.
Yarken reduces these gaps by keeping headcount and financial planning in one connected workflow. A workforce entry becomes a financial budget or forecast entry through system-defined rules, so users can trace the cost from the role and headcount back to the financial account and cost center.
How Workforce Planning fits into Budget and Forecasting
Workforce Planning is part of Yarken’s Budget and Forecast process.
The typical navigation path is:
Planning → Budgets and Forecasts → Workforce Planning
Within this flow, users create a budget or forecast, open the Workforce Planning tab, and add workforce entries. Each entry includes planning details such as role, cost center, entity, expense type, and monthly headcount.
After headcount is entered, Yarken calculates workforce costs and generates the corresponding budget or forecast values. These generated values follow the same review, approval, and publishing process as other budget and forecast data.
What happens after a workforce plan is created?
After a workforce plan is created and headcount is entered:
-
Yarken reads the selected role and its annual rate.
-
The annual rate is converted into a monthly cost.
-
Monthly headcount is multiplied by the monthly cost.
-
The total cost is distributed across mapped financial accounts.
-
Budget or forecast entries are created automatically.
-
The plan moves through review, approval, and publishing.
Generated budget entries are controlled by the Workforce Planning source. If the workforce cost needs to change, update the workforce entry or headcount rather than editing the generated budget line directly.
Next step
Workforce Planning concepts and terminology
Related content
Workforce Planning process and workflow
Configure Workforce Planning roles and account mappings
Create and manage Workforce Plans
Review Workforce Plans as a Budget Contributor
Workforce Planning cost calculations