The regular ‘number’ checks in companies

Employee and labour costs are often the biggest cost factor in service companies, food & restaurant business and the retail trade. Workforce and labour costs include all expenses incurred by employees. If they increase, this cannot be absorbed immediately by a price increase in the core products or services the business deals with. Regularly ascertaining key employee figures are therefore very important. Especially for people-intensive companies.

Business ratios are used in the management of companies for a systematic assessment of the economic situation of the company. Controlling does not only refer to the typical key figures from the balance sheet such as liquidity or equity ratio. For the current financial year, the information is often obtained from the monthly profit and loss account.

Each industry has its own standards for the most important key figures, so the profitability of a company can best be compared with its competitors. But there are others that will determine the overall health and well-being of the employees and the company as a whole.

We have described 5 helpful employee indicators for you in the following article:

Revenue per Employee hour

This metric is directly related to the retail trade and food businesses. Revenue per hour of an employee is the ratio of revenue generated (in €) to the number of hours of employees employed. It is more meaningful than sales per employee because different working time models (such as part-time work) are not taken into account. In Papershift, this key data can be created with the help of so-called combined metrics and then displayed graphically as a report. Sales can either be entered manually or transferred from an external application via our API. The turnover can then be set in relation to the actual hours worked by the employees.

Employee costs

Employee expenses comprise all expenses for workers. These are the wages or salaries to be paid. The surcharges, as well as the employer’s contributions to social insurance, the amounts for the employers’ liability insurance association and others. The costs for (non-productive) administrative employees are also taken into account.

Sickness. Not always physical

The sickness rate of a company compares the number of sick employees with that of the entire workforce. This data not only indicates the state of health of the employees, but a high sickness rate is also an indication of a large workload, dissatisfaction or lack of motivation of employees.
If you also use Papershift to plan absences in the company, you can create a report that accesses all absences of the type “illness”.

Overtime and Overdue

The total of overtime and undertime hours in the company is the degree of measurement for the appropriate engagement of the company with its employees. This key figure may only be high temporarily, for example for seasonal reasons. To obtain an evaluation of this key figure, the target hours of the employees are set in relation to the actual hours worked. Within the reports in Papershift, the recorded data can be grouped by employee, work area or location.

Net Staffing requirements

In human resources, the gross personnel requirement is seen as the number of all employees that the company needs in order to implement its economic goals. If the HR managers subtract the already hired employees, they receive the net personnel requirement. This is actually the number of employees that need to be hired.

Example of the representation of evaluation in Papershift. With our report module, you can display and evaluate internal and external metrics.

The challenge with data

Accounting, controlling and human resources must work closely together to determine these important key data. Today, intelligent software solutions enable efficient and timely evaluation of all data. The prerequisite for this is permanent and conscientious maintenance of all workforce and employee master data and the exact recording of working hours. For example, in order to determine key employee data in hospitals, the number of employees and the number of hours worked, as well as the number of patients treated and their accounts with the health insurance companies must always be available in real-time.

What if the key employee figures are discouraging

If the key employee figures show an imbalance in the company, action must be taken as quickly as possible. This requires quick decisions to be made by HR teams. Measures, such as flexibilization of working hours or reduction of jobs for example. These numbers and data are relevant to company management as well. If the revenue generated cannot keep up with the costs for the employees, the entire enterprise is at risk. Thus HR teams need to have a larger overview of the employee performance and mental well-being for optimizing costs and maximizing revenue.