Headcount Forecasting: Enhanced Accuracy with Precanto

Precanto brings the power of AI/ML to your finance tech stack.

Precanto empowers budget owners to make headcount decisions, while allowing finance to run P&L scenarios, around better headcount forecasting.

With Precanto’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, FP&A leaders reduce the time wasted reconciling and aggregating headcount data across multiple source systems and enhance their ability to make more strategic decisions to drive business growth.

Precanto aggregates headcount data from across your systems of record – planning, accounting, recruiting and HR – into an easy to read dashboard, significantly reducing finance leaders’ time wasted on basic data collection. Then, Precanto creates models that act as a check against spreadsheets and other planning systems to constantly drive towards enhanced forecasting accuracy.

Here’s how it works.

Enhanced forecasting accuracy

Open Precanto, and you’ll instantly see an overview of your company’s headcount spend performance. The company baseline compared against Precanto’s prediction of your upcoming headcount spend is right there – with current numbers. The Company Baseline number leverages data from your planning systems.

The Precanto Predict number represents where your forecast will likely land for the quarter or the year, based on Precanto’s artificial intelligence and machine learning. Precanto Predict considers actuals, committed expenses and planned expenses to build that forecast.

*Precanto’s home screen displays your company baseline alongside Precanto’s prediction.*

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Precanto allows you to click into categories, so you can view predictions and variances across departments and location, or view predictions by expense type in your General Ledger.

This data is updated in real time as the information on actual spend flows in from your accounting system.

*Real-time variance is broken down by location and department.*

Real-time visibility into headcount spend

The General Ledger view shows your committed and non-committed spend, broken down by expense categories and compared against your company baseline. This way, you can quickly see the variance from baseline in real time.

*General Ledger view with expense categories showing actual spend, upcoming expenses, Precanto’s Predict, company baseline and the real-time variance.*

Artificial intelligence and machine learning power predictions

Utilizing advanced AI/ML technology, Precanto mines your enterprise data and historical patterns to identify key metrics such as average time to hire, attrition rates, application status, and recruiter capacity.

By harnessing these insights, Precanto identifies Predicted Hires – open reqs likely to close in a given time period – which offers a more realistic picture of your hiring opportunities and threats.

*See Open Reqs (to be hired) and Precanto’s Predicted Hires/*

Scenario simulation and analysis for strategic planning

Predictions based on current data are great. But business isn’t static – there’s always what ifs around the corner. With Precanto, you can model those out too.

What happens if you:

Grow the Chicago office vs. Dallas?
Swap out two open manager reqs for four SDR openings?
Shift spend from R&D to sales?

Instead of emotional debates between finance and budget owners, or hours spent in spreadsheets, Precanto lets teams simulate budget reallocations and analyze their potential impacts in minutes.

Budget owners can run budget reallocation scenarios and view the impact before submitting their request to the finance team for approvals.

Finance teams can visualize the impact on P&L before processing the request within the Precanto platform.

*The budget owner view shows what if scenarios.*

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*The finance team view visualizes hiring impacts on P&L.*

Data optimization

Precanto's data optimization capability transforms your raw financial data into a strategic asset. This feature encompasses two critical processes: data cleansing and reconciliation. Via machine learning, Precanto eradicates inaccuracies, duplicates, and anomalies, ensuring that every piece of information used in your forecasting is precise and reliable. Enterprise planning solutions can’t do this.

Precanto’s advanced reconciliation process seamlessly integrates and aligns data from diverse sources across your finance tech stack. This harmonization offers a unified, accurate source of truth and enhances the overall quality of your predictions and forecasts.