Revenue per Employee Revenue per FTE / Revenue per Head
How much revenue the business generates for each person it employs, a coarse gauge of workforce productivity.
The fork, why two teams get different numbers
Both the top and the bottom of the ratio fork. Revenue: GAAP recognized
revenue vs ARR vs gross billings, a marketplace quoting revenue-per-head on
gross merchandise value looks many times more productive than the same firm
on net take-rate revenue. Headcount: full-time employees only vs
FTE-equivalents that fold in part-timers and contractors, and point-in-time
period-end headcount vs average headcount across the period. An operator
building an internal efficiency target uses ARR over current headcount; an
investor benchmarking peers uses trailing recognized revenue over average
headcount. The same workforce yields figures that differ by a factor of two.
The trap
The number is trivially gamed by moving work off the employee line: reclassifying staff as contractors or offshoring to a vendor shrinks headcount while revenue holds, manufacturing a productivity "gain" that is really labor arbitrage or an off-balance-sheet shift.
- The full trap, worked on a real export
- Every formula variant, spelled out
- The reconciliation anchor, what to tie it to and when to refuse
Reference: No authoritative accounting standard (operating metric) · SEC Regulation S-K Item 101(c) (human-capital disclosure)