Ask three people in your organization for last month's turnover rate and you may get three different answers. HR has one number, Finance has another, and the one in the board deck came from a spreadsheet nobody can quite trace. Everyone is working from the same Infor HR data, so how do the numbers drift so far apart?
The good news is that turnover isn't hard to measure. It's hard to measure the same way twice. Once your team agrees on a few definitions and builds one report around them, the arguments about the number go away and the conversation turns to what the number means.
Does a transfer to another department count as a departure? What about a retirement, the end of a seasonal contract, or someone who was rehired a week later? Each choice is reasonable, but if HR counts one way and Finance counts another, the rates will never match.
A turnover rate is departures divided by headcount, and headcount can be measured at the start of the month, the end of the month, or as an average. Pick a different base and the same departures give you a different rate.
A single turnover rate hides the most useful question: are people choosing to leave? Resignations call for a different response than terminations or layoffs, and leaders can't act on a number that blends them.
The termination date, the effective date and the date the change was entered can all fall in different months. When one report uses the entry date and another uses the effective date, departures land in different periods.
When the turnover report lives in a spreadsheet, each month starts with an export and a round of fixes. Small differences in how someone filters or sorts the data become differences in the number.
Write down what counts as a departure, which reasons are voluntary and involuntary, which date decides the month, and which headcount base you use. Keep it to one page and get HR and Finance to sign off. That page is what makes the number repeatable.
Build the turnover report in your own Infor reporting tools, using your agreed definitions, so it runs the same way every month without re-keying. Show turnover by department and by length of service, so you can see where it is concentrated and whether you're losing people early.
Turnover should agree with headcount. Starting headcount, plus hires and transfers in, minus departures and transfers out, should equal ending headcount, by department. When it doesn't, something has been missed or counted twice. Checking that tie each month is what lets you trust the rate.
One month of turnover is noisy. A rolling twelve-month view, split into voluntary and involuntary, shows whether things are actually getting better or worse.
ECS Reporting Solutions brings over 20 years of Infor and Lawson reporting experience to HR, payroll and finance teams. With Turnover Watch, we define the solution together with your team, your team builds one monthly turnover report from your Infor HR data with our guidance, and we check that it ties to headcount every month. Book a free, private 30-minute Private Reporting Review, and we'll look at your HR reporting with you.