Why an HR dashboard when Nmbrs already has reports?

Nmbrs has standard reports, and for payroll processing itself they work fine. But as soon as your questions go beyond a single payroll run, you often get stuck. How are labour costs developing compared with revenue? Which department has structurally higher absence? How many contracts expire in the next three months?

The answer then usually sits in an export to Excel, a few hours of copying and pasting, and a list that is out of date again a month later. An HR dashboard in Power BI fetches that data automatically, places it alongside your organisational structure and, if you like, your financial figures, and refreshes it without anyone having to do anything.

The key difference: you stop looking at separate lists and start looking at trends. And in HR especially, you only really see problems coming when you can follow the development over several months.

Which HR KPIs belong on the dashboard?

For an SME, six numbers are enough to steer well. They all come from data held in Nmbrs, as far as your subscription, modules and permissions allow.

  1. Headcount and FTE. How many people do you employ and how many FTE is that, per department, location or cost centre? Show it as a twelve-month trend, not just today's figure. Source: employee and employment data.
  2. Labour costs per period and per FTE. Total labour costs, broken down into payroll components such as gross salary, employer contributions and allowances. Divide by headcount and you see whether costs per FTE are rising because of indexation, different staff or something you did not expect. Source: payroll runs and payroll components.
  3. Hires, leavers and turnover. How many people join and leave in a period. Turnover is usually calculated as the number of leavers divided by the average number of employees in that period. Distinguish between voluntary and involuntary departures if you record the reason, because the two call for very different responses. Source: start and end dates of employment.
  4. Absence rate. The number of days absent divided by the number of available days, times one hundred. Decide whether you count calendar days or working days and whether you correct for FTE, and stick to that choice. Otherwise next year you will be comparing apples with oranges. Source: absence records.
  5. Absence frequency. The average number of sick reports per employee per year. Where the absence rate is driven mainly by long-term absence, frequency tells you something about short, repeated absence. That is often the first sign of workload or dissatisfaction in a team. Source: absence records.
  6. Expiring contracts. Which fixed-term contracts end in the next three months, so you decide in time whether to extend, offer a permanent contract or part ways. This is not a trend but an action list, which is why it is often the part HR starts using first. Source: contract data.

If hours and leave are also recorded in Nmbrs, you can add capacity and leave balances later. See that as a second round, not the starting point. Read more about which data can be included on our page about the Power BI and Nmbrs integration.

How do you handle sensitive payroll data?

With an HR dashboard, this is the question you answer before anything else. Nmbrs holds personal data, salaries and absence records. That calls for clear choices, ideally on paper before a single visual is built.

  • Only fetch what you need. If you do not need to show social security numbers, addresses or bank account numbers, do not fetch them. Less data means less risk.
  • Show aggregates where possible. For most decisions, a managing director only needs totals per department. Employee-level detail is for those who really need it.
  • Limit who sees what. With row-level security in Power BI, a manager only sees their own team. Salary data can go on a separate page that only HR and management can open.
  • Be careful with small groups. The absence rate of a three-person department quickly points to one individual. Agree on a minimum group size below which you do not show figures separately.
  • Be deliberate about absence data. Show absence duration and frequency, not medical information. That does not belong in a dashboard.

Also think about licensing: in most situations, everyone who views a shared dashboard needs a Power BI Pro licence. Read which licence fits in Power BI licensing in 2026.

How do you get the data from Nmbrs into Power BI?

Nmbrs has a REST API that works with OAuth and a separate subscription key. It lets you fetch employees, employments, payroll components and absence, as far as your account and permissions allow. The older SOAP API is being phased out, so a new integration should be built on the REST API.

You can sometimes connect Power BI directly to an API like this, and for a first trial that is fine. For a dashboard you want to build on, an intermediate layer is usually the wiser choice: a small database or data pipeline that fetches, checks and stores the data. It handles pagination and failed refreshes and, more importantly, it keeps history.

That last point is essential in HR. Many APIs mainly show the current state. If you want to see today's headcount a year from now, or calculate turnover per quarter, you have to record that state periodically yourself. That is typical data engineering work, and the difference between a dashboard that shows today and one that shows trends.

What does an HR dashboard look like in practice?

A fictional example to make it concrete. Imagine an installation company with 60 employees across three departments, payroll in Nmbrs and accounting in a separate package. Each month the managing director and the HR adviser open one report with three pages.

  • Page 1, overview (management and HR): FTE per department as a twelve-month trend, turnover over the last twelve months, absence rate and absence frequency per department, and a list of contracts expiring within three months.
  • Page 2, labour costs (management and HR only): labour costs per month broken down into payroll components, labour costs per FTE, and labour costs as a percentage of revenue by placing the accounting figures alongside.
  • Page 3, team (per manager): through row-level security, each manager only sees headcount, absence and expiring contracts for their own team. No salaries.

The report refreshes daily. The monthly HR meeting no longer starts with gathering numbers, but with the question of why short-term absence in one department has been rising for three months.

How do you start an HR dashboard on Nmbrs?

  1. Define the questions, not the charts. Which three to five decisions do you want to make better? Think: should we hire, where is absence rising, which contracts need action? The KPIs follow from that.
  2. Agree on definitions and access. What counts as an FTE, how do you calculate absence and turnover, and who may see which level of detail? Write it down and have HR and management sign it off.
  3. Set up API access with minimal permissions. Create an account or app in Nmbrs with read-only access to the companies and data you need. Nothing more.
  4. Build the data model first and check the totals. Do the labour costs in your model match the totals in Nmbrs? Is the headcount right? Only then do you start on the visuals.
  5. Start with one page and real users. Let the managing director and HR work with it for a month. Their questions decide what goes on the second page.
  6. Automate the signals. A list of expiring contracts is useful; an automatic alert a month in advance is even better. You can add steps like that later with workflow automation.

Want to put the HR dashboard next to finance, sales and operations later on? Then also read The 10 KPIs every SME dashboard needs.

Help with your HR dashboard on Nmbrs

Which HR numbers make the difference for you depends on your organisation, your Nmbrs setup and the decisions you take every month. Want to talk through what is feasible and what a logical first step would be? See how we connect Nmbrs to Power BI and what we do in dashboarding.