When you oversee millions in payroll and benefits, every assumption matters.

School district CFOs and business officials know that forecasting salaries and benefits takes more than math. It takes accuracy, consistency, and confidence to explain how every number fits into the bigger picture.

In conversations with district finance leaders, Frontline’s Analytics Advisors – Heather Taylor and Stacy Overly – havebeen exploring a simpler, more connected way to forecast. Their approach centers on clarity, connection, and confidence – fewer moving parts, fewer manual updates, and more meaningful analysis.

The Challenge: Forecasting That Consumes Too Much Time

Many district finance leaders describe their current process as time-intensive and fragmented:

• Too many inputs. Hundreds of data points and spreadsheets to maintain each year.
• Disconnected assumptions. Salary, retirement, and healthcare costs often live in separate models.
• Pressure to explain the “why.” Boards expect clarity, but it’s hard to trace every number back to a single source.

A More Strategic Way to Plan

Frontline’s Financial Planning Analytics brings these elements together in one connected experience. The approach focuses on what matters most – starting from your real data, adjusting only essential levers, and linking salaries and benefits in a single view.

1. Start from What’s Real

Begin every projection with your prior-year actuals. This foundation eliminates guesswork and ensures that your forecasts reflect reality from the start.

The salary assumption view provides one place to enter base and step changes and applies them across all years in your forecast.

Example: Enter negotiated base increases and step changes once, and the model carries them through future years, reducing manual work and the chance of inconsistency.  

2. Focus on the Key Drivers

Rather than modeling hundreds of line items, concentrate on the three factors that shape your budget’s trajectory:

• Base increases such as 3 or 4 percent
• Step movement using a placeholder like 1.5 percent
• Staffing changes including additions, retirements, and 27^th-pay adjustments

Staffing adjustments are simple to capture, whether you’re planning retirements or hiring new staff.

Example: Add a new first-grade teacher at $75,000 while modeling a retiring teacher at $100,000. The platform instantly calculates a $25,000 net savings and rolls it into your projection.

3. Connect Salaries and Benefits

Once salary projections are set, retirement and healthcare costs follow automatically. Linking benefits to salary assumptions, gives you a complete view of total compensation.

• Retirement: Modeled as a percentage of total salaries, using a three-year average.
• Health insurance: Driven by annual premium trends (typically 7-8 percent) and plan mix (single vs. family).
• Scenario testing: Adjust employee premium share to see the financial impact instantly.

Example: Increasing the employee premium share by 10 percent in FY28 automatically shows the potential district savings alongside updated benefit totals.

After benefits assumptions are entered, you can visualize how total costs evolve across multiple fiscal years – a clear picture of long-term financial commitments and the effect of plan design, employee contributions, or staffing shifts. 

Example: View annual total benefits and expense trends to understand how changes in salaries, staffing, or healthcare assumptions affect your district’s long-term financial position.

Review and Validate with Confidence

Once assumptions are entered, the full forecast can be reviewed visually. Charts display how salaries and benefits evolve year over year, helping you identify anomalies and prepare answers before presenting to the board.

Visual validation: Review year-over-year salary trends to confirm your assumptions align with expectations and explain any changes clearly.

Why CFOs Are Embracing this Approach

Finance leaders using Frontline Financial Planning Analytics cite three clear benefits:

1. Faster forecasting that saves valuable time each budget cycle.
2. Consistent assumptions that keep salaries and benefits aligned
3. More credible communication with boards, staff, and the community

How to Begin

To put this approach into action: