How creating staffing budgets works

This section describes on a high level how the budgeting functionality in WFM works. Note that the budgeting process in WFM is only for staffing and does not include any information on cost. The staffing budget can be used as a basis for your cost budget.

Preparations

There are a few things to prepare before you start to create the staffing budget, to make it as accurate as possible.

Create a budget group and add the skills that you are creating a staffing budget for. Skills that share resources should belong to the same budget group. Avoid using the same skill in more than one budget group.
If needed, update the contract, contract schedule and part-time percentage information for the agents who have the skills that you are creating a staffing budget for. This information is used when importing staffing values to the budget.
Assign the budget group to the agents who have the skills included in the budget group. Do not assign the budget group to the hourly employees if you do not want to include them when importing staffing values to the budget.
Create a forecast for the skills for the time period that you are creating a staffing budget for. This is not mandatory but enables import of forecast data to the budget.
Collect input that might impact the number of available resources. This can be for example the attrition rate for agents, any planned recruitment, the percentage of people absent on vacations or because they are ill, and efficiency losses due to the time agents are scheduled on meetings, short breaks or training.

Create a budget

Use the procedures in the Create a staffing budget page for detailed information on how to fill in the values. You do not have to go through the procedures in any specific order. Go through the steps once and then go back to adjust the values if needed.

Compare the available resources to the forecasted agents. Use this tool to test different ways to align the available resources with the forecasted agents.

Revise the budget

The imported staffing and forecast values will not be automatically updated with any changes. The manually entered values might also need to be updated. Import staffing and forecast information again and make manual adjustments where it is needed.