The Employee Costs tab gives Finance teams a full summary of employee-related costs, bringing together predefined contract values, actual payroll data and employee expenses in a single view. It's the tab to use for budgeting, cost allocation and reporting.

This article explains the cost concepts shown in the tab, how to filter and group the data, and how to export it.

Where to find the Employee Costs tab

To access it:

1. In your sidebar, go to Financial planning in the Finance section.
2. The Employee Costs tab is selected by default.

What's included in Employee Costs

Agreement cost

Data taken directly from each employee's contract. Use it as a reference for the predefined conditions and costs agreed with the employee.

This is what you planned to pay when onboarding the employee, and we use it to compare against payroll and expenses.

Employee expenses

All employee-related expenses from the Spending product with the statuses Approved, Paid, Sent to pay (SEPA) and In payroll. You can see the total or break it down by concept by clicking the chevron.

Which date an expense is counted under

Expenses analytics don't use the date the expense was created or incurred. Each expense is counted in the period of its most recent change — whichever month that change happened in.

Because expenses keep moving through statuses, an expense can therefore move from one period to another over time. It is counted in one period only: the latest one.

• Example: an expense was approved last month, so last month it appeared in that month's total. This month it changes to Paid. From now on, Financial Planning shows that expense in this month and no longer in last month's total.

Only expenses in the four statuses above are shown. If an expense moves to a status that isn't one of them, it drops out of the tab entirely.

Labor Cost

The main KPI in this tab is Labor Cost — your company's total cost per employee, obtained from the "Company Cost" concept in your payroll summaries. You'll find the detailed salary breakdown, based on the uploaded payroll summary, in the Compensation Data tab.

Filters

Click Filters to narrow the view down to the costs you want to analyze. Six dimensions are available:

• Data source — choose which cost information to include (agreement, payroll, expenses).
• Legal entity — if your company has multiple legal entities set up in Factorial.
• Cost centre — if you've set up Cost centres in Factorial.
• People — specific employees.
• Role — the roles from your Job catalogue. Each role can be expanded to select specific levels within it (for example Junior, Mid, Senior), so you can filter a whole role or only certain levels of it.
• Workplaces — any workplace defined in your organization setup.

Each dimension opens a searchable, multi-select list. Select the values you need and click Apply Filters, or Clear filters to start over. Filters can be combined, and the view responds to all of them at once.

• Example: How much are we spending on the Development and Design cost centres this year?

Date filters and comparison

All the figures in the tab are shown for a period you choose, and you can compare that period against an earlier one.

Selecting a period

The period selector sits at the top right of the tab and shows the period currently applied — for example 2026.

1. Click the period selector to open it.
2. Under Selected by, choose the granularity you want: Month, Quarter or Year.
3. Pick the period you want from the grid. Use the ‹ › arrows above the grid to move through the available range (for example 2020 → 2026).
4. Click ‹ › either side of the period selector to step to the previous or next period without reopening the picker.

The granularity you pick here also sets the intervals shown in the graph and the table.

Comparing periods

Comparison lets you put the selected period side by side with an earlier one, so you can see how costs have moved rather than only what they are today.

Open the period selector and use the Compare to dropdown at the bottom. It's set to None by default, meaning no comparison is applied.

What you can compare against depends on the granularity you've selected:

History: headcount and FTE

The History panel shows how your workforce itself changed over the selected period. It's the quickest way to tell whether a movement in costs comes from salary changes or from people joining and leaving.

To open it, click the clock icon next to the data status selector at the top right of the tab. Close it with the ✕ in the panel header.

HC and FTE

Two KPIs sit at the top of the panel, calculated for the period you've selected:

• HC (headcount) — the number of employees.
• FTE (full-time equivalent) — the same population weighted by contract hours, so an employee on a half-time contract counts as 0.5. FTE is lower than HC whenever you employ anyone part-time.

Each KPI has an ⓘ tooltip with more detail.

Monthly breakdown

Below the KPIs, a month-by-month list shows the new hires and terminations recorded in each month of the period. Expand a month to see its detail, or use Collapse breakdown to fold the list back up.

• Example: Labor cost jumped in June — was that a salary change, or did we add people? Open History and check the new hires recorded for June.

Group by

Use the Group by option to change the visual breakdown in the table. It doesn't change the data, only how it's presented for reporting.

To do so, first select your filter, then click Group by to break down the data.

• Example: Can you provide a breakdown of costs by manager for the Marketing and Product Design cost centers?

Export

Independently of the filters and groups you've applied, you can export the view. Based on your selected filters and grouping, Factorial generates a .xlsx Excel file and sends it to your Factorial email.