Invoca boosts productivity and collaboration by 50%

One full-time resource dedicated to headcount, and still not getting it quite right

The headcount planning and management process at Invoca was painful. It involved a lot of information flowing between a lot of people and systems, with no single source of truth for data or insights.

At a high level, Daniel and his team faced three major challenges with their headcount management process.

• Manual and disjointed process: Multiple systems, spreadsheets, and communication platforms, leading to fragmented information and inefficiencies.
• Lack of real-time data: Spent hours each month exporting and reconciling data from various sources, often resulting in incomplete or outdated information.
• Limited visibility and collaboration: Hiring managers, recruiters, and finance teams lacked comprehensive visibility into headcount-related information, such as approved roles, budgets, and start dates. This lack of visibility caused communication gaps, delays, and the potential for errors or misunderstandings between departments.

How the headcount process worked

We had our master spreadsheet that had every role that we approved in our plan. It was dynamic, so as a new employee was hired, or someone left the company, we added their information, created backfills, closed out roles.

To get the information needed for forecasting and reporting, Invoca's Finance team relied on exports from Namely (HRIS) and Greenhouse (ATS), as well as one-off notes from channels like email and Slack. Typically, these one-off notes were related to future terminations, which affected the forecast but couldn't be input in Namely until the term had happened.

Then, Finance needed to meet with recruiters and HR business partners to try and track everything related to hiring.

Meanwhile, there were separate spreadsheets for each of the business owners, so that they could have visibility into their department's hiring without seeing the data of other departments.

In order to reconcile their budget and forecast, the Finance team would then have to import the master spreadsheet into their budgeting tool, Planful. This was a major import in itself, and it took time to get the spreadsheet prepped for proper upload.

While all this is happening, there would be promotions and other employee changes going on, and all of those were handled in different ways.

All in all, we had dedicated one full time employee, a Finance analyst, completely to headcount management just because of how much manual work it was.

Approvals for all budget-impacting changes

Before TeamOhana, new headcount and change requests came through multiple channels and required vetting. Sometimes, unapproved headcount or changes would occur and affect the forecast. Now, every incremental and change request follows an automated approval flow before Talent can begin working on it.

Headcount reconciliation

It would typically take a Financial Analyst between 4-8 hours to reconcile a master headcount spreadsheet, pulling together counts and costs for current employees, pending starts, future terms, and approved hires. With TeamOhana, all of that work is automated, reducing time spent to zero.

Internal transfers

Internal transfers can be one of the most complex workflows for Finance teams to execute manually, since it involves three separate headcount openings for a single person. Invoca now initiates TeamOhana's internal transfer workflow and the platform takes care of the entire process.

Terminations

For some employee changes, like terminations, information came through email and Slack because they wouldn’t have been updated in Namely yet, but it affected our numbers.

Future terminations used to be a challenge because they were tracked and documented in disjointed channels, since the HRIS system could not account for terminations on a future date. But TeamOhana can. Now, Invoca's team simply enters the termination date and TeamOhana writes the data to the HRIS at the appropriate time, so Finance gets their forecast correct and HR runs a smooth offboarding process.