How to Supplement Information to your HR system

Petra Weisenborn

Basic reports from online systems often must provide the correct representation for your analyses. This is usually solved by exporting the information to your favourite spreadsheet. We frequently see this happen with accounting software.

The disadvantage of exporting data is that it leaves its safe environment, is already dated after exporting, and starts to lead its "own" life in another file. This not only applies to accounting software but also to HR systems.

You don't want privacy-sensitive information, such as HR data, wandering around in Excel files. But how can you analyze this information securely?

Our Education Specialist, Petra Weisenborn, regularly encounters this issue and explains it further.

The Challenge

The HR manager of an organization wants to gather information about the staff composition to ensure effective management and planning. His questions are not very demanding. He wants to know about his staff's mix of job functions and how it develops over time. In particular, he wants to know about their tenure and the reasons why they leave the organization.

An HR system is usually very good at registering staff. Mutations are meticulously kept, and you can inspect the full history to learn everything about a particular employee.

However, when it comes to more aggregate questions and filtering particular staff data, the reports may not be as flexible as needed. One reason that it has been hard to report correctly on a reference day in the past is that some employee characteristics change over time. For example, their pay scale, function, or working hours may change.

You get the actual situation when you pull a report from the HR system. There is no option to ask about a reference day in the past, as it would require quite some modelling of the data to align them correctly.

The Solution

With XLReporting, we can pull fresh data from the HR system and use a model to line up all the required reporting items. We then freeze the reporting items and label them with the current period. This allows us to report on a selected past period and multiple chosen periods.

Extracting data from that system is often unnecessary because you are working with a system containing privacy-sensitive data. An aggregated form of your data is sufficient for the above analysis purposes. And that is easy to configure while importing your data. Another advantage of exporting data to a spreadsheet is that it often contains too much data.

This enables the HR manager to inspect and analyze how data from one period develop into the next. He can use pivot table reports and filter the data (business unit, cost unit, type of contract, etc.) to present it in his preferred format.

Reporting with data that is important for your analyses is best done in a suitable solution. This ensures that you can analyze your HR data at a safe and aggregated level. XLReporting can connect HR data with AFAS and Visma HRM & Payroll. If you would like to know more about this, please contact us.