How To Do Workforce Planning in Excel (With Template)

Of all the issues that businesses and organizations need to solve, workforce planning seems like it’d be comparatively simple: On the surface, it merely amounts to sizing up an organization’s needs, and rightsizing its human ranks accordingly.

But consider this: Your CFO wants a hiring plan that supports the product launch in Q3. Your department heads are pushing for headcount increases. And you're stuck reconciling conflicting spreadsheets, outdated assumptions, and labor cost estimates that may or may not include the full cost burden of benefits and taxes for new personnel.

For most organizations, workforce costs account for more than 70% of total expenses, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet, despite this massive cost center, only 12% of HR professionals conduct strategic workforce planning with a three-year outlook, per a 2025 McKinsey survey. Finance is left piecing together headcount data from multiple sources while trying to forecast costs that shift monthly.

The good news? You don't need to start from scratch.

With Vena’s structured Excel template for workforce planning, you can centralize assumptions, model scenarios, forecast fully-burdened costs, and create dashboards that give leadership the visibility they need.

Strategic Workforce Planning: The Reality for Finance Teams

Despite the heavy burden of workforce costs, they remain some of the least consistently reported metrics, according to RJ Milnor, Founder and CEO of People Analytics Partners, speaking on the "People Metrics That Matter" episode of The CFO Show Podcast.

"The goal is to understand how your workforce is contributing to the bottom line—whether it's driving profitability, driving productivity or reducing costs," RJ says. "The more I think about how we unlock value, it's about using the workforce we have to unleash more productivity. Those are the metrics I'm really keying in on."

In other words, workforce planning is about understanding which roles drive revenue, where costs are bloating and how to optimize for productivity before you commit to a hire.

What KPIs Actually Matter in Workforce Planning?

Total headcount costs aren't just an HR metric—they're a core financial lever. When working out your one-year headcount budget, consider which KPIs to prioritize:

• Total number of hires needed
• Departments affected (marketing, production, customer success)
• Ramp time for new employees to reach full productivity
• Expected attrition rates
• Fully burdened costs (salary, benefits, taxes, bonuses)

Each of these metrics becomes an assumption in your workforce planning model, and those assumptions directly impact forecast accuracy. That's where Vena's workforce planning template comes in. It helps you piece together the plan, one assumption at a time, without starting from scratch.

How To Do Strategic Workforce Planning in Excel

Download the template and then work through the following steps to help put together your headcount plan.

Step 1: Establish Cost Assumptions

Before you can forecast headcount costs accurately, you need to understand what an employee actually costs, not just their base salary.

Consider this example:

That's a 43% premium over base salary. Miss these details, and your headcount budget will be off by nearly half. So let's build those assumptions into your model.

Enter Your Fiscal Year Settings

Open Vena's workforce planning template and navigate to the Input tab. This is your command center for all cost assumptions.

In rows 3–5, specify your fiscal year and the month it begins:

Define Employee Cost Assumptions

Scroll down to rows 10–14 (cells B10–B14) and enter these five cost drivers:

• Tax rates: Source from your payroll provider, IRS Publication 926 or state agencies
• Benefits costs: Calculate rates across all employees
• Employment status: Specify full-time or part-time
• Total hours: Enter standard work hours per position
• Wage rates: Pull from your HRIS system or HR analyst

Source this information from department heads and senior managers.

Pro Tip: Use Blended Rates for Speed

If you don't have exact benefits costs for every role, use your HR team's blended rate, the average benefits cost across all employees. For a first-pass model, "in the ballpark" beats "precisely wrong because you spent three weeks gathering perfect data." You can refine assumptions during your Q2 forecast refresh.

Now, with your cost assumptions outlined, you're ready to model individual positions.

Step 2: Input Headcount Details

Next, you’re getting into the meat of the model, which requires filling out more detailed accounts for each position or employee.  

On the template, scroll down past the “Assumptions” table to the “Position” table, starting in row 19. You’ll see rows for each team member:

Fill out the fields in the table, including specific positions, departments, and even potential start and end dates, if they’re known. For example, you can start by navigating to cell B19 to add the name of a team member, and identify their respective department in cell C19. 

Bonuses and benefits costs may or may not apply in every instance, but for some organizations, adding them creates an even more accurate planning forecast. For example, a retail company might plan on hiring seasonal employees during the holidays who are not eligible for bonuses. In that case, you could establish that those employees are not bonus eligible (column M), while stipulating that permanent store managers are eligible for 15% bonuses (bonus percentage can be input in column N).

Once all cells are filled out for each team member, the template will calculate a Fully Burdened Cost in Column V.

Why These Details Matter

Getting baseline assumptions wrong, or at least not even in the ballpark, can completely throw off budgets and lead to some surprises in the middle of the year or cycle.  

Think of it this way: If you’ve budgeted $75,000 salaries for eight customer success managers, the back-of-the-envelope math amounts to $600,000 in employee costs. But you could be missing or not accounting for $250,000 or $300,000 in taxes, benefits and bonuses.

Step 3: Finalize Assumptions and Generate 12-Month Schedules

Once you’ve specified detailed assumptions for your headcount and taken into account things like bonus eligibility, the template will also generate monthly summaries in columns W-CJ. Here, you’ll get a glimpse of what total forecasted headcount expenses look like.

Step 4: Analyze Cost Trends and Hiring Patterns by Department

Now that you've modeled your full headcount plan, it's time to surface insights leadership actually wants to see: Which departments are ballooning? Where are you overpaying for talent? Which teams need reinforcements?

Navigate to the Department Summary tab to see your data transformed into executive-ready visuals.

The tab automatically generates three views that tell your workforce story:

1. A stacked bar chart showing how headcount shifts across departments month by month
2. A line graph tracking average cost per employee—spot wage inflation before it spirals
3. A heat map flagging any department with >20% year-over-year cost growth

Why These Visualizations Matter

These aren't just pretty charts—they enable scenario planning. Mark Raley, Head of Finance at footwear retailer Schuh, uses data like this to model workforce what-ifs: "What if we bring another shift in? Or what if we change the productivity rates for a certain type of activity? What would that do to the payroll cost ultimately?"

Look for Patterns That Signal Bigger Trends

For example: If your sales department's costs jumped 40% but headcount only grew 20%, you likely hired senior sellers at higher rates. That means your cost-per-hire assumptions need updating for next quarter—and you should flag this trend to your CFO before approving the next sales req.

Scroll down to Row 17 to see department-by-department breakdowns:

• Year-over-year headcount changes
• Average fully burdened cost per employee
• Total departmental spend.

What to Look For:

• Departments with >15% cost growth but flat headcount (you're hiring more expensive roles)
• Teams with declining average costs (possible attrition of senior staff)
• Departments approaching budget thresholds (time for a forecast refresh)

Use these insights to spot cost concentrations early—before they become budget overruns. If marketing's average cost per employee spiked 30% quarter-over-quarter, investigate whether that's a hiring mix shift or a compensation adjustment before forecasting next quarter.

Step 5: Spot Position-Level Cost Trends and Hiring Gaps

Finally, navigate to the Position Summary tab. That tab likewise generates a stacked bar graph (as you’ll see in rows 7-17), and allows you to analyze cost summaries by position, department, or cost center (via a dropdown menu in row 5).

For instance, if you wanted to see the costs of the specific positions in the executive department, you could select that department from the drop-down menu, see a list of the company’s current executives and their fully-burdened costs, broken down by month, starting in row 20.

You can also get a look at average costs by month by employee or department, which can give you an idea of what cost increases might look like if headcount increases. So, if average costs increase during a few months in the summer for a seasonal business, the finance team may have a good idea of how that seasonal rush translates into additional costs by looking at this particular section.

Analyzing these trends by position gives you a bird’s eye view of costs, total headcount, and average compensation (column S), all of which help plan hiring and workforce additions for the coming year.

When You May Need More Than a Workforce Planning Template

As businesses and organizations grow and become more complex, so do their needs related to workforce planning. So, there may be a time when you outgrow spreadsheets and need to consider a dedicated workforce planning software or platform.

This was the situation that Citizens Advice found itself in. The U.K.-based charity relied on its finance team, armed with workforce planning spreadsheets, to shoulder its headcount planning operations. That did the trick for a while, but the organization found itself outgrowing its reliance on spreadsheets.

“We were keen to get away from spreadsheets due to the potential for manual errors. We wanted to empower the organization with a more accurate view of our costs,” says Kate McKenna, a Senior Management Accountant with Citizens Advice. To augment its workforce planning, Citizens Advice partnered with Vena and put the dedicated workflow builder (paired with the native Excel interface) to work. 

That helped develop a deeper sense of ownership from budget owners and department heads related to staffing and headcount, and made it simpler for them all to input data related to expenses. Reporting and forecasting became easier and more accurate, and Vena pulls the data from the organization’s ERP automatically on a daily basis to make sure information is up-to-date. 

If you’re experiencing frequent errors or consolidation delays while using spreadsheets for workforce planning, it may be time to consider leaving the spreadsheets and moving to dedicated software for workforce planning.

Level Up Your Workforce Planning with Vena

Our template for Excel helps you manage your workforce planning efforts. But there may come a time when those efforts need to scale along with your organization.

That’s when it makes sense to consider Vena.

Vena’s platform can be used for workforce planning by HR or finance teams, modeling new hires, aligning workforce costs to budgets, drilling into data, forecasting and tracking staffing needs—the whole shebang.

It can do it all from within Excel, and paired with interactive dashboards that go above and beyond spreadsheets. Not only that, but Vena integrates with HRIS and payroll systems, too.