Volte | Back-Office Benchmarking Tool

About this tool

A free tool from Volte that benchmarks your organisation's back-office support costs and staffing against the New Zealand public sector.

It uses Treasury's Benchmarking of Administrative & Support Services (BASS) data for FY2016/17, the last published round, covering 26 agencies across HR, Finance, ICT, Procurement and Corporate & Executive Services.

What it does: compares your cost and staffing ratios against a cohort of similar agencies, function by function, on a like-for-like ratio basis.

Limitations: it is not an exact peer match for very small organisations (the smallest benchmarked agency is about 108 FTE), and the data is from 2016/17, so use the inflation setting to bring dollar figures to today.

Nothing you enter is stored on any server; it stays in your browser. To save or share your work, use the Copy shareable link button, which turns your workings into a unique link you can bookmark or send to others.

1. Your organisation

Organisation name Reporting year Total organisational FTE i Total organisational headcount i Total organisational running costs ($) i

2. Your functions

Cost in today's dollars. Enter what you can; leave blanks as 0.

Cost $

FTE

TOTAL

3. Comparator & settings

Cohort mode i Size band i

Dollar view i Inflation factor (2017 to now) i

CPI Mar-2026 (1339) / Jun-2017 (1000). Editable.

Cost analysis

Your organisation vs the cohort spread (min, quartiles, median, max), as BASS reports. Lower = leaner. % ratios are inflation-neutral.

FTE analysis

Staffing as a share of the organisation. For % rows lower = leaner; for employees-per-FTE rows higher = leaner.

By function: your organisation vs cohort median

Corporate & Executive Services FTE is not collected in BASS, so it is excluded from FTE charts.

Compare one function in detail

Function Metric (for the ranked bar)

Scatter size filter i Cohort only i

Scatters plot each agency's function size/cost against its total organisation size/cost, with a trend line across the entities shown.
Your organisation is the gold marker.

Source: The Treasury, BASS FY2016/17 (metric-bnchmrk-16-17.xlsx), finalised 20 Dec 2017. The programme was discontinued after this round; this is the most recent official data. Nothing you enter is stored on any server.