How to plan headcount on Starch

Headcount planning is the process of deciding who you need to hire, when, and what you can actually afford to pay them — and then holding that plan up against your cash position often enough that you don't get surprised. It sits at the intersection of financial modeling and operational reality, which is why it tends to fall through the cracks: finance thinks HR owns it, HR thinks finance owns it, and the founder ends up doing it in a spreadsheet on a Sunday night before a board meeting.

What the workflow looks like varies — how many open roles you're managing, what your burn tolerance is, whether you're modeling against a raise or against revenue — but the core problem is the same everywhere: you need a living view of your hiring plan, not a document you update twice a year.

On Starch, you describe the headcount model you want — roles, start dates, fully-loaded costs, department splits — and Starch builds it against your actual Stripe revenue and Plaid bank data so the numbers stay current without manual exports. The result is a hiring plan that updates alongside your real financials: you can see what adding two engineers in Q3 does to your runway, compare a conservative and aggressive scenario side by side, and walk into a board meeting with a current answer instead of a stale one. The Scenario Analysis and Runway Analysis apps give you the financial backbone; you layer your headcount assumptions on top and the cash impact shows up immediately.