Turnover report

Turnover report

The turnover report shows who joined, who left, and what that means as a rate. Use it to spot a rising exit rate early, to see which departments lose people, and to answer the board question of what your turnover actually is.

Where: My Team › Reports › Turnover You need: the Reports (team) right

Before you start

Turnover is only as good as your leaver data. Two things affect the numbers before you read them:

  • A separation needs a last day recorded, or the person is not counted as having left.
  • A separation should have a separation type so it lands in voluntary or involuntary.

Terminations recorded before separation types existed have none, and appear as Not classified.

Choosing a period

You can look at the last month, the last 6 months, or the last 12 months, and narrow further by subsidiary, branch, department, position and separation type.

Twelve months is the figure to quote externally — shorter windows swing wildly in a small company, where one or two departures move the rate by several points.

The summary cards

CardWhat it means
HeadcountActive employees at the end of the period
JoinersPeople who started during the period
LeaversEveryone who left, whatever the reason
VoluntaryResignations and other employee-initiated exits
InvoluntaryCompany-initiated exits
Turnover rateLeavers as a percentage of your average headcount
Annualised rateThat rate projected to a full year

Why voluntary and involuntary may not add up

This is the question the report generates most often, and the answer is not a bug.

Unclassified separations belong to neither bucket. If you have 10 leavers, 6 voluntary and 2 involuntary, the missing 2 are separations with no type recorded. They are still counted in the total and still affect your turnover rate — they simply cannot be attributed.

If those two numbers do not reconcile, you have unclassified separations, and the fix is to set a separation type on them.

Period rate versus annualised rate

The two rates answer different questions and should not be used interchangeably.

  • Period rate — actual turnover over the window you selected. Over 3 months, this is

your 3-month turnover.

  • Annualised rate — that same rate projected across a full year, so periods of

different lengths can be compared.

Quote the annualised figure when benchmarking, and the period figure when reporting what actually happened.

How the rate is calculated

Leavers are divided by average active headcount over the period, not by your headcount on the final day.

This matters in a growing company. If you started the year with 50 people and ended with 100, dividing by 100 would flatter the number and dividing by 50 would exaggerate it. The average is the fair denominator.

End-of-contract exclusions

Your company can choose to exclude end-of-contract separations from turnover — sensible where fixed-term contracts ending on schedule are normal business, not attrition.

When that setting is on, the turnover card says so and tells you how many separations were excluded. If your rate looks lower than expected, check this first: the leavers are still in the list, they are just outside the rate.

The monthly breakdown

Each month shows joiners, leavers, net change, closing headcount, and that month's rate, so you can see whether a figure is a trend or a single bad month.

One deliberate behaviour to know: the leavers count on a monthly row shows every separation that month, ignoring any separation-type filter you have applied. So a month can read "5 separations" and then show none when expanded under a filter. That is intentional — it stops a filter hiding the fact that people left at all.

The leaver list

Every separation in the period, with department, subsidiary, branch and position, last day, hire date, tenure, separation type and — where termination pay was processed — the statutory reason.

Two fields are blank more often than people expect:

  • Tenure is blank when either the hire date or the last day is missing.
  • Reason for termination is blank when no termination pay was processed. Its absence

says nothing about why the person left.

Exporting

The report exports for use in a spreadsheet or board pack. Export what you are looking at — the current period and filters carry into the file.

What to do with it

  • Turnover climbing in one department — that is usually a manager or workload issue, not a

company-wide one. The departmental filter tells you where to look.

  • Short tenures — people leaving inside a year points at hiring or onboarding rather than

retention.

  • Lots of "Not classified" — your leaver data needs attention before the report can tell

you anything about why people leave.

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