I'mBoard API Docs

Fully-loaded compensation for engineering, data, QA, DevOps, and technical leadership for the period (salary, employer taxes, benefits). The largest R&D cost for most software companies. — Finance KPI, I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier).

I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier)

No public third-party standard anchors this KPI yet, so I'mBoard authors and maintains the definition — transparently labeled as editorial tier. See the ontology methodology for the published vs editorial tier system and the back-attribution workstream.

Rogue ID: finance.rd_payroll Type: Currency Domain: Finance

Definition

Fully-loaded compensation for engineering, data, QA, DevOps, and technical leadership for the period (salary, employer taxes, benefits). The largest R&D cost for most software companies.

Formula

Fully-loaded R&D personnel cost for the period.

Why it matters

The dominant input to R&D spend and a primary driver of total burn.

How to interpret

Track against headcount plan; step-changes usually reflect hiring or comp true-ups.

Calculation policy

How an AI agent should compute this KPI from messy company data. Free-text rules consumed at reasoning time — not a deterministic DSL. The most common ways to get this wrong are listed under Common miscomputations.

Inclusion rules

Fully-loaded compensation (salary + employer taxes + benefits) for engineering, data, QA, DevOps, and technical leadership EMPLOYEES.

Exclusion rules

Contractors, freelancers, and dev shops — those are finance.contractors_outsourcing, not payroll.
Product managers and designers (finance.product_design_payroll) and engineering tooling (finance.rd_tools_software).
Production cloud serving customers (finance.cloud_hosting, COGS).

Required inputs

R&D-classified employee roster with fully-loaded cost.
Period payroll register mapped to department.

Data-source priority

Payroll system grouped by department.
HRIS headcount mapping as the classification source.

Edge cases

An engineer split between R&D and COGS support is allocated by time.
Mid-period new hires are prorated; comp true-ups step the line.
If the company capitalizes software-development labor, state the convention — capitalized labor is not expensed here.

Validation checks

Track against the headcount plan; step-changes should map to hiring or comp true-ups.
Rolls into finance.total_rnd. NOTE: finance.total_rnd and product.rd_monthly_spend are two views of the SAME R&D spend — never sum them.

Common miscomputations

Reporting base payroll instead of fully-loaded cost — under-reports true R&D burn by 25–40%.
Folding contractors into payroll — breaks the employee-vs-contractor read and double-counts against finance.contractors_outsourcing.
Double-counting R&D payroll against the product.rd_monthly_spend roll-up.

finance.total_rnd
hr.total_headcount

Source

I'mBoard editorial — authored and maintained by I'mBoard, first published 2026-04-01. No third-party standard is cited for this KPI; when one emerges, the definition is back-attributed and promoted to the published tier (a minor version bump). Read the ontology methodology for the published vs editorial tier system, attribution rules, and dispute process.