Heads, or full-time equivalents?

Headcount counts people: one worker, one head, whether they work five days a week or two. Full-time equivalent counts capacity: a half-time worker is 0.5, a job share splitting one role is two heads and one FTE. The two numbers answer different questions, and they diverge by exactly the part-time population.

The trouble is that delivered dashboards report a number and rarely say which one. The trending store aggregates heads. A board slide says workforce is 351, finance divides cost by it, and nobody states that capacity is lower. The headcount report fixes the four definitions; this page is the one that most often hides.

Same 351 heads the headcount page reports, but 341.0 FTE of capacity: ten equivalents live in the part-time gap, most of them in Support. The gap is small until it hits a ratio. May employer cost is about 13,285 per head, but about 13,675 per FTE, and plans written in FTE will read three percent off against actuals counted in heads. Sample values are illustrative, never client data.

Every row of the daily worker snapshot carries the worker’s FTE fraction. Headcount is the count of rows; FTE is the sum of the fractions; both come from the same fact, for any as-of date, each labeled on the report that shows it. No second source, no silent choice, no board slide that means one thing while finance reads the other.

-- heads and FTE, side by side, from the daily snapshot
SELECT d.department_name,
       COUNT(*)          AS headcount,
       SUM(f.fte_fraction) AS fte
FROM fct_worker_day f
JOIN dim_department d ON f.department_key = d.department_key
WHERE f.snapshot_date = DATE '2026-05-31' AND f.is_active
GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC

Revenue per FTE, cost per FTE, and plan-versus-actual all read the capacity column; span of control and roster questions read the head column. The point is not that one is right, but that the report says which it used.