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HR Budgeting: Cost Planning, Forecasting, 250+ Tools
8,683 students
HR Budgeting: Cost Planning, Forecasting, 250+ Tools
Plan your HR budget: compensation costs, employee benefits, human resources finance, HR metrics, formulas and templates
Last updated 10/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Take away 250+ tools in 38 downloadable lecture presentations: formulas, templates, question lists, checklists and matrices
- Build an HR budget with a step-by-step budgeting procedure and checklists for payroll, vacancies, bonuses and benefits
- Use 31 ready formulas and metric sets: hiring needs, turnover, recruiting, onboarding and training return
- Plan the recruitment budget with a vacancy forecast, recruiter headcount calculation and budget template
- Budget salaries, salary reviews, bonuses and benefits with matrices and audit checklists
- Justify training and HR automation spending with return and cost-benefit calculations
- Forecast headcount with ratio analysis, workload analysis and turnover data
- Read financial statements and speak with the CFO in the language of numbers
- Link the HR budget to business strategy and get it approved
- Learn with Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy: 1,800,000+ enrollments, 170,000 students, about 200 books on Amazon
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Course content
8 sections • 39 lectures • 21h 13m total length
Requirements
- No finance background required: every calculation comes with a formula and an example
- Basic HR experience is helpful
- Nothing to buy for the course itself: presentations are attached to the lectures
- A spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Sheets for your own calculations
- Start with the first three sections, then open the specialist sections you need
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
252 tools for HR budgeting in one course: 145 ready-to-use formulas, templates, question lists, checklists and matrices, 106 models and methods, and 1 service shown on screen.
Open a lecture, take the tool, use it in your next budget.
Why HR budgets get cut
HR asks for money in words: we need another recruiter, we need training, people are leaving. Finance answers in numbers. When HR cannot show how many people must be hired, what turnover costs and what a training program returns, the budget is cut first and questions come later.
What changes after this course
You build the budget line by line: payroll, vacancies, salary reviews, bonuses, benefits, recruitment, training, HR systems. You forecast headcount from data, not from requests. You calculate what turnover costs and what onboarding and training return. You read the income statement and balance sheet. And you bring a budget that the CFO can check and approve.
What is inside: 252 tools, counted file by file
You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.
- 38 downloadable resources: the lecture presentations
- 145 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
- 31 formulas and metric sets: workload-based workforce forecasting, hiring needs calculation, HR automation cost-benefit calculation, training economic benefits calculation
- 30 templates and sample documents: budget approval process, recruitment budget, training ROI calculation, human capital ROI calculator
- 28 question lists and conversation scripts: overhead budgeting, financial health review, budget risk assessment
- 19 step-by-step procedures and workflows: HR budgeting, workforce planning, Total Rewards budgeting, operational cash flow forecasting
- 19 scorecards, rubrics and scoring matrices: benefits cost-effectiveness matrix, recruitment lead-time matrix, salary review matrix, training cost-benefit cash flow analysis
- 18 checklists: payroll budgeting, vacancy budgeting, bonus budgeting, benefits budgeting
- 106 models and methods explained with examples: linear regression, net present value, internal rate of return, Delphi forecasting
- 1 service shown on screen: Yahoo Finance
Where the tools are
- HR budgeting core (3 sections, 50 tools). Budget structure and alignment with business goals, recruitment, salaries, bonuses and benefits, training and HR automation.
- HR metrics for budgeting (63 tools). Recruitment and onboarding, engagement surveys, payroll and Total Rewards, development, turnover costs.
- Business finance for HR leaders (63 tools). Business environment, strategy, financial statements and return-based budgets.
- Workforce planning and cost optimization (75 tools). Staffing demand, capacity, headcount costs, productivity and cost-benefit analysis.
- Financial models and budget efficiency (34 tools). Financial goals, process mapping, KPIs and simple budgets.
Who is teaching
I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe.
I joined the STB television channel as head of recruitment and onboarding. There were two recruiters with about 100 vacancies each, and the plan was to add recruiters one at a time. Instead I counted the vacancies in work and in the managers' plans: 442 people to find. I built a model from 6 to 17 recruiters showing how many months each option would take to close them, and brought it to management. They said: we need about 12, let us hire 10 now and two more later. That is how a budget is defended, and this course gives you the formulas for it.
How to use the course
Watch the first three sections in order to build your first budget. Then use the rest as a reference: section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.
What is included
- 39 lectures across 8 sections, 21 hours
- 38 downloadable resources: lecture presentations
- 252 tools across the lessons, ready to copy into your own work
- A 10-question practice test, a quiz and a role play
- Lifetime access to all materials
- Active instructor support in the Q&A section
- A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Where to start
Take your current headcount and open vacancies. Open the first lecture, go through the payroll and vacancy budgeting checklists and calculate your hiring needs. Enrol now and start your first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- HR managers who prepare the HR budget for the first time
- HR directors who defend the budget in front of the CEO and CFO
- HR business partners who plan headcount and people costs for their business units
- Compensation and benefits, recruitment and L&D leads responsible for their own cost lines
- Founders and managers who want to understand what people really cost the company