Journal ·
Establishment and headcount are not the same argument
HR defends posts; finance defends costed lines. An establishment audit is the unglamorous work of putting both lists on one page before the budget round.
Headcount is people in post on a day. Establishment is the posts someone has agreed to fund. Vacancy is the gap, except when it is not: a post unfilled for eighteen months is often a saving that HR is still advertising and finance has already spent elsewhere.
The argument in the budget round is rarely about the definition. It is about who kept the list. HR’s file still contains acting-up arrangements that became quiet permanents. Finance’s file still contains posts that were deleted in a previous year and never removed from the recruitment system. Both parties are telling the truth about their own spreadsheet.
An establishment audit is a pairing session, not a lecture. We sit with both files, cost centre by cost centre, and write a third table that names:
- posts in both files
- posts only HR holds
- posts only finance holds
- acting-up older than a year
- vacancies older than a locally agreed threshold (we use nine months unless you have a tighter rule)
The commentary is short. It does not accuse. It asks the organisation to choose, on paper, which of the orphan posts still exist. Until that choice is made, every workforce planning scenario is theatre: you cannot cut or grow a post that is only real in one office.
This work is dull. It is also the reason a later board pack can talk about scenarios without the finance director flipping to a private printout.