Introduction

The training budget is what the company estimates it will spend in the course of the year on employee development. This is the estimated cost of professional training (internal or external).

Approach 1: A "Top-down" structure

With this approach, the budget is defined before collecting the individual needs of employees:

• Based on training costs over the previous period, and making forecasts (organic growth, inflation, etc.) for the following period
• Based on a percentage of the payroll (on average, this is typically between 1.5% and 2%)
• Based on a training hours objective to be achieved following the plan x an average hourly cost of training (see the help page)

Approach 2: A "Bottom-up" structure

With this approach, the budget is set after the individual needs of employees have been collected, by drawing up a provisional plan.

Drawing up a provisional plan involves the following steps: 

1) Defining the types of costs to be allocated to the training budget (i.e. teaching costs, additional costs?, Participants' expense reports?, etc.) 

2) Establishing strategic directions, making it possible to identify collective and priority actions as well as the scope of employees concerned

3) Taking into account changes in the legal context, to update the company's regulatory training courses

4) Taking into account mandatory and regulatory training, which enables us to estimate the number of employees who need to take regulatory or mandatory training courses, and the number of employees who need refresher training (see the help page)

5) Collecting the individual needs of employees, prioritized by their manager (see the help page)

6) Creating a provisional plan

7) Review of financing options via OPCO (a French skills operator) or subsidies (see the help page) 

8) Taking into account a safety margin in order to process requests over time once the plan has been launched

Creating a provisional plan with Poplee Training

Step 1: Take into account mandatory training:

In your plan, add the sessions required to cover:

• Planned collective and priority actions
• Regulatory training + mandatory training courses within the company

When you add these sessions, specify the number of places required (*) as well as the costs so that the projected expenses for your plan are correctly calculated.

(*) If the session has a fixed cost for a specific number of places, remember to add as many sessions as you need to cover the estimated number of places

You do not need to open the sessions at this stage. 

You can access a financing simulation for the session before adding it to your plan. This allows you to keep an eye on the projected expenses (and your remaining budget if you are using a "top-down" approach). 

In your plan, add the sessions required to cover the need for refresher training, which you can identify using the "Refresher training required" interface (see the help page). 

Step 2: Take into account individual employee requests:

From your Administration > Requests to be processed interface, add employee requests to your plan. 

Adding a request to a plan means that the employee and their manager will see the request has been accepted. However, no email is sent to the employee or their manager.

The requests added to a plan can be seen in the "Requests" tab of the plan. 

Step 3: Analyzing your plan and estimated budget 

Estimated budget for individual requests

From the "Reporting" module, download the "Requests to be processed" report:

By filtering by requests added ("Status of the request" column = "Pending registration") and by the plan concerned ("Plan name" column), you can calculate the estimated costs of these requests by performing the following calculation: 

Estimated cost of a request = (Cost per session/Number of places) + Cost per participant

• Status of the request = Column G
• Plan name = Column U
• Cost per session = Column AB
• Number of places = Column XX
• Cost per participant = Column Z

Estimated budget for mandatory training

From the "Budget monitoring" tab in your plan, hover your cursor over the "Equity" indicator. You will have direct access to the budget required to finance your provisional plan. 

At this stage, the training budget does not account for financing options and is therefore financed entirely from your own funds.

• Estimated = expenditure for all sessions with the "Draft" status 
• Committed = expenditure for all sessions with the "Open", "In progress", or "Completed" statuses
• Completed = expenditure for all sessions with the "Closed" status (regardless of whether or not the employee attended)

Combine the two estimated budgets. If you think that your projected expenses are too high at this stage (or if you have exceeded your training budget), you can:

• Remove a request from the plan (an email will be sent to the employee and their manager) 
• Delete a session (in "draft" status)  

Note: changes coming soon 

You will have access to a financing simulation for the request before adding it to your plan. This allows you to keep an eye on the projected expenses (and your remaining budget if you are using a "top-down" approach).

When you add these requests, they will automatically (*) be taken into account in the projected expenses for your plan, provided that you have entered the estimated costs of the training courses in your catalog in advance.

(*) Requests added to the plan are financed from "Equity" and only counted when the number of places available in the sessions (for the same training course) is not sufficient to cover the number of requests

In your plan, you have access to a summary version of the budget monitoring which allows you to easily identify how the budget is being used.

Validating your training budget

Next, go to the "Budget target" tab of your plan and enter this amount in the "Training budget" field, adding a margin to allow for future requests that will arrive over time once as the plan is launched and to anticipate future negotiations for your "Equity" budget. We recommend adding a 20% margin. 

Enter your training hours objective to be achieved by the end of the plan and check that this target aligns with your budget (see the help page).

Step 4: Take into account the financing options and validate your training budget

From the "Financing" tab of your plan, enter:

• The sum of the budgets available from your OPCO (priority actions, skills development plan, etc.) under "external" financing
• Your budget goal for recoverable subsidies (see the help page)

The "Equity" indicator (calculated) gives you your company's budget for financing the training courses in your plan.

Has your simulation been validated? You can now plan the sessions and employee registrations

Once your simulation has been validated, you can move on to planning the sessions and registering employees by:

• Opening sessions previously added to the plan (a prerequisite for registering employees)
• Registering employees previously added to the plan via the "Requests" tab in your plan.

A window opens with a list of the sessions available and the associated actions:

From a session, you can also:

• Register employees previously added to the plan 
• Fill up as many places in your session as possible by:
  • Registering employees who have submitted a request for this training course which has not yet been accepted
  • Adding additional employees to this session