What HR Reports Can Be Easily Built Without IT Support?

From employment laws to recruitment, HR teams need to move quickly from one task to the next. Self-service HR reporting is an easy way to avoid bottlenecks and reduce your reliance on IT specialists.

Creating custom HR reports without IT means you can complete technical jobs yourself, rather than waiting on someone else. Turnover analysis, headcount planning, and monitoring training are just a few examples.

In contrast, manually raising multiple IT tickets can cause backlogs during recruitment, compensation review cycles, and compliance audits.

Read on to explore what human resources teams can build for themselves, and how the right HR platform can help get you there.

What self-service HR reporting actually means

Self-service HR reporting allows human resources teams to build and generate analytical reports themselves, using an intuitive platform.

Self-service doesn’t require in-depth technical training or data engineering knowledge. Instead, you can analyze data, find quick answers, and monitor workflows without the involvement of an IT team. This way, you can save time on raising tickets and requesting support.

By choosing the right HR platform, even non-technical users can build reports and dashboards via filters, templates, and drag-and-drop features.

What reports should HR own from end-to-end?

There are four main custom HR reports you can generally handle without IT support. These are turnover analysis and exit metrics, headcount planning, compensation ratio analysis, and training completion reviews.

Turnover analysis and exit metrics

This is one of the most common areas where an HR platform report builder could help. You can break down technical barriers by generating reports on:

• Staff turnover rates, filterable by monthly or quarterly timeframes, or split according to business, department, or line manager
• The number of voluntary departures from your organization over a certain period versus termination rates
• Average times to fill roles, from first advertising a position to officially hiring someone
• Exit interview trends, such as the most common reasons for leaving

To build these custom HR reports without IT, you’ll need a platform with date-range and department filters, plus code or reason groupings.

You might still need IT expertise for more technical tasks, such as syncing your platform with external exit surveys or termination data.

Headcount planning and FTE reporting

Headcount planning is another key operational metric for HR teams, and one that needs to be done regularly to keep up with the scrutiny from senior leadership. A self-service HR reporting platform could help you to identify:

• Up-to-date headcount figures at a company-wide, department, location, or role level
• How organizational budgets compare to your actual headcount
• Pending headcounts, once current hiring plans are factored in
• Full-time equivalent (FTE) tracking, breaking down the data for full-time staff, part-time employees, and contractors
• How the organization hierarchy looks, using clear visuals

When comparing different HR platforms, look for those offering regular or real-time data updates, plus filters for things like seniority and location.

Generally, you’ll only need to raise IT support tickets for more technical tasks, such as syncing with financial systems and budgeting software.

Compensation ratio analysis

The right HR platform and report builder can also help you with compensation reporting, while keeping this sensitive data safe and secure.

Dashboards and reporting tools give you the chance to break down:

• Pay ratios, filtering by different genders, roles, departments, or lengths of service
• Compensation band penetration, showing where different employees fall within a particular wage bracket
• The distribution of merit increases
• Year-on-year salary growth trends and insights

To carry out these tasks, your HR platform should support conditional formatting, quickly flagging any outlier datapoints. Calculated fields are also important when identifying wage trends by age, length of service, and other variables.

Of course, employee compensation is a sensitive area. For that reason, it’s wise to escalate more complex tasks to IT specialists. This might be the case if you need to sync wage data with external benchmarking tools or require more forensic equations such as regression analysis.

Data security is paramount here. To help with audit trails, it’s worth double-checking that your platform can track people’s access to compensation data.

Training completion and development

Learning and development is a central pillar of HR, connecting everything from company culture and staff retention to performance management.

Automated tools can help you with a wide variety of reports. They include:

• Monitoring training completion rates by reviewing employees’ compliance with mandatory training by filtering departments, groups, and courses
• Seeing how fast training is completed by working out the average days to complete specific courses
• Understanding non-completion rates by identifying those who have missed deadlines and the reasons why
• Flagging people’s skills gaps compared to what they need for their role, which usually requires a joined-up human resources information system (HRIS) and learning management system (LMS)

To build these custom HR reports without IT, your software will need to offer enrolment status filters and date-based calculations. It must join up the dots between employees, course enrolments, and completions.

For more complex tasks, like building predictive models or integrating external LMS data, you’ll still require IT assistance.

What your platform report builder must support

When comparing HR platform report builder tools, there are a range of essential features to look out for. From filtering to alerts, here are the main ones to remember:

Filtering and segmentation

HR reports are all about breaking down large datasets into digestible summaries and key trends. User-friendly filtering and segmentation features can help you achieve this. For example:

• Date range filters
• Category dropdowns, like the employee’s location, department, manager, and the status of a task
• Text-based search bars to find an employee’s name or specific job category directly
• Logical operators to see if certain conditions are met
• Saving filters as templates to avoid rebuilding common lists in the future, such as remote staff or recent hires

Calculated fields

Calculated fields apply a formula to existing data entries to automatically work out an equation. In HR reporting, they might support:

• Hire date calculations that show people’s length of service in years, months, or days
• Salary comparisons against the employee’s wider department or role average
• Identifying your company’s turnover rate, based on resignations, terminations, and overall headcount
• Calculating the length of time between two events, like the gap between enrolment in and completion of a training course, or a person’s hiring date and first appraisal

Visualization options

Self-service HR reporting tools aren’t just about data analysis. They can also present your findings clearly, succinctly, and accurately. Look for tools offering a wide variety of visualization options, such as:

• Tables that can be filtered, sorted, and exported with minimal effort
• Trend lines to display statistics like turnover rates in a more visually engaging way
• Heatmaps showing top-performing and underperforming departments
• Display cards that flag headline findings, like the organization’s overall headcount or recent hires
• Distribution charts to explain age-based and salary-related trends

With different presentation formats, you can match the needs of specific audiences. For example, senior leaders might want to see top-level statistics on display cards, while more detailed tables may be the preferred choice for HR analysts.

Scheduled distribution and alerts

Finally, check the practicalities of setting up alerts and automatic distribution. Does your self-service HR reporting software offer the following?

• Automated email deliveries on set dates, such as monthly employee turnover reports that go to senior executives
• Threshold alerts when your organization hits specific targets, like a 3% jump in staff turnover or an approaching training deadline
• Different file export options, such as PDFs, Excel documents, and CSV
• Access restrictions and permissions, with staff members only able to view specific data

When to get IT involved and why

HR professionals can’t be expected to complete specialist technical tasks. Even with dedicated software, some reporting jobs are best left to IT experts. Here are some of the main ones:

Advanced analytics

Vendors and IT departments are generally better placed to handle complicated analytical work that requires pre-built models or data science knowledge. This includes:

• Predictive models that use machine learning to forecast future trends
• In-depth cohort analysis which digs down into people’s backgrounds, schools, or where they were hired from
• Explanations of anomalies in datasets
• Statistical significance testing to determine whether certain results are genuine or have simply occurred as a one-off

Custom integrations

Integrating your data with external tools and systems is another task that’s best left to vendors and IT teams. Examples include:

• Integrating exit survey data from a third party with your HR software
• Transferring data from your human resources information system to a business intelligence platform
• Joining up training data from a range of learning management systems

IT teams can generally handle security and infrastructure, while data mapping is often a job for vendors.

Data warehouse integration

A data warehouse is a central place to store and analyze key business data. When integrating it with HR platforms, you’ll usually need the assistance of IT specialists. This is the case when:

• Linking up HR data and financial systems
• Adding data from external sources, like census results and salary benchmarks within your industry
• Syncing data from legacy systems
• Improving the quality of data via cleaning and deleting duplicate entries

Putting these tasks in the hands of IT teams can ensure your data architecture stays secure and robust.

Next steps: Get ready to do your own HR reporting

Self-service HR reporting helps you skip the back-and-forth of support tickets and reclaim your time. Just be sure to take your time when selecting a platform—the right fit makes all the difference.

Before choosing a vendor and platform, ask yourself:

• Will I be able to filter headcount statistics based on departments, locations, statuses, and date ranges without IT support?
• Can I use custom fields to work out turnover rate calculations?
• Is it possible to sync employee records with compensation and training data?
• Can I automatically schedule alerts and email reports to stakeholders?
• Can I export data in formats like PDFs and Excel and restrict access?

If any of your answers are no, you might need to widen your search.