People & HR

How to plan headcount as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Headcount planning for a chief of staff means stitching together a spreadsheet that no one trusts. You pull actuals from Paylocity or ADP, guess at open-req timing from a Notion hiring tracker that's three weeks stale, cross-reference offer pipeline from a Google Sheet the recruiting lead owns, and then reconcile all of it against the budget numbers the CFO approved in QuickBooks — usually at 11pm before a board meeting. The plan lives in a Google Sheet that breaks every time someone sorts a column. You rebuild it quarterly from scratch. You are not a finance team. You are one person who is also coordinating the exec offsite this week.

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People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live headcount plan that pulls actual payroll data from Paylocity or ADP on a schedule, so your 'current headcount' number is never a guess

A scenario model that shows the cash and runway impact of hiring plans you're weighing — with your actual Plaid and Stripe data as the baseline, not spreadsheet assumptions

A single source of truth you can drop into the board deck or share with the CFO without reformatting anything

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Budgeting Scenario Analysis Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule for actuals headcount and payroll run-rate. Starch syncs your Plaid transactions and Stripe revenue on a schedule as the cash baseline for scenario modeling. QuickBooks entity data (bills, invoices, payments) syncs on a schedule for budget-vs-actual reconciliation. Open reqs and hiring pipeline data from tools like Greenhouse or Lever are queried live from Starch's integration catalog when your headcount app runs. Notion hiring docs are synced on a schedule so your tracker reflects the latest notes from recruiting.

Prompts to copy

Build me a headcount budget tracker that shows approved headcount by department, current filled seats pulled from Paylocity, open reqs with estimated start dates, and monthly salary run-rate. Flag any department that's more than 10% over its approved headcount budget.

Create a scenario model that compares three hiring plans: current pace, accelerated (add 8 engineers by Q3), and conservative (freeze all non-critical hires). For each scenario, show cash runway using our Plaid bank data and Stripe revenue, and the month we'd need to raise or cut.

Show me a monthly burn breakdown where I can see exactly how much of total burn is people cost versus other opex, using our Plaid transactions and Paylocity payroll data.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP in Starch — Starch syncs employee records, active headcount by department, and payroll run-rate on a schedule. This becomes your authoritative 'seats filled' number.

2 Connect Plaid and Stripe — Starch syncs bank transactions and revenue data on a schedule. These become the cash baseline every scenario model pulls from, so you're not entering assumptions from memory.

3 Connect QuickBooks — Starch syncs invoice, bill, payment, and journal-entry data on a schedule. This is where your approved department budgets and actuals live.

4 Connect your ATS (Greenhouse or Lever) from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your headcount app needs to pull open reqs, candidate stage, and estimated start dates.

5 Connect Notion from Starch — Starch syncs your hiring planning docs and databases on a schedule, so notes from recruiting syncs and offer approvals flow into your tracker automatically.

6 Start with the Budgeting app from the Starch App Store. Fork it and tell Starch: 'Restructure this budget tracker by department and show me approved headcount, filled seats from Paylocity, open reqs from Greenhouse, and monthly salary run-rate versus budget.' Starch rebuilds the surface to match.

7 Start with the Scenario Analysis app and tell Starch to compare your three hiring plans — current pace, accelerated, and conservative freeze — using live Plaid and Stripe data as the baseline. Starch builds the scenario model; you adjust the assumptions (hire count, timing, average comp) in natural language.

8 Start with the Runway Analysis app to get a live burn dashboard. Then tell Starch: 'Add a people-cost line that shows payroll as a percentage of total burn each month.' Starch adds the breakdown without you touching any underlying code.

9 Ask Starch to add a headcount-plan-to-actual variance table: 'Show the difference between planned headcount at the start of each quarter and actual filled seats at quarter-end, by department, for the last four quarters.' This becomes the slide you put in every board deck.

10 Set up a weekly automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull current headcount from Paylocity, check for any new open reqs added in Greenhouse, and Slack me a summary of headcount vs. budget by department.' You stop rebuilding this report manually.

11 When the CFO asks for a board-ready headcount slide, pull the scenario model and variance table from Starch, export the data, and drop it into your deck. No reformatting — the numbers are already current.

12 When assumptions change mid-quarter — a hire falls through, a new req gets approved — tell Starch to update the scenario: 'Adjust the accelerated scenario to reflect the two engineering offers that rescinded and push the Q3 close date by six weeks.' Starch reruns the model; you review the new runway output.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q3 2026 headcount plan — 150-person growth-stage company

Sample numbers from a real run

Engineering — approved headcount	42
Engineering — filled seats (Paylocity actual)	38
Engineering — open reqs (Greenhouse)	6
Monthly payroll run-rate (engineering)	612,000
Total company monthly burn (Plaid)	1,850,000
People cost as % of burn	71
Runway at current pace (months)	14
Runway if accelerated hiring plan executes (months)	9

It's the first week of July. You're building the Q3 board deck and the CEO wants a clean answer to 'what does our hiring plan do to runway?' Your Starch headcount tracker shows engineering at 38 filled seats against a 42-person approved budget, with 6 open reqs in Greenhouse at various stages. Paylocity data puts engineering payroll at $612k/month. Total company burn from Plaid is $1.85M/month, so people cost is running at 71% of burn — higher than the 65% the CFO modeled at the start of the year. You pull up the Scenario Analysis app. The baseline (current 38-seat pace, no new reqs) shows 14 months of runway. The accelerated plan — all 6 reqs close by September, plus 4 additional hires the VP of Engineering just requested — drops runway to 9 months and puts the next raise squarely in Q1 2027. You tell Starch: 'Add a fourth scenario that shows what happens if we close only 3 of the 6 open reqs and hold the 4 additional requests until January.' Starch adds it in under a minute. The new scenario shows 12 months of runway — enough cushion to start a Series B process from a position of strength rather than urgency. That's the recommendation you bring to the board. The whole analysis took 20 minutes, not a Sunday.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Headcount vs. approved budget by department (filled seats / approved seats)

Monthly payroll run-rate as a percentage of total burn

Open-req pipeline: number of reqs, average days-to-fill, estimated total comp impact at close

Runway delta across hiring scenarios (months of cash at current vs. accelerated vs. conservative pace)

Quarterly headcount-plan-to-actual variance (planned vs. filled at quarter-end, by department)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Sheets + manual Paylocity exports

Flexible but requires someone to pull and paste actuals every time the board asks; breaks when a column gets sorted and no one notices until the numbers are already in the deck.

Notion hiring tracker

Good for notes and req approvals, but Notion doesn't pull payroll actuals or model cash runway — you're still reconciling it against a separate spreadsheet.

Workday or Rippling workforce planning module

Purpose-built for HR, but expensive, slow to implement, and doesn't connect your headcount plan to Plaid burn or Stripe revenue for scenario modeling — so the CoS still builds a separate financial model anyway.

Anaplan or Adaptive Insights

Powerful financial modeling for large finance teams, but the implementation takes months and requires a dedicated admin — overkill for a 150-person company where the CoS owns the model.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, scenario planning, runway analysis all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch pull actual salary data from Paylocity or ADP, or just headcount?

Starch syncs employee records, org units, and pay statements from Paylocity and ADP on a schedule — so you get both headcount by department and payroll run-rate. You're not just counting seats; you're seeing what those seats cost each month.

What if my open reqs are tracked in Greenhouse or Lever, not in Paylocity?

Connect Greenhouse or Lever from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your headcount app runs, pulling req status, stage, and estimated start dates. Your tracker can show filled seats from Paylocity and pipeline from Greenhouse side by side.

Can I model comp by role, not just by department aggregate?

Yes. Tell Starch what you want: 'Break the headcount model down by role level — IC3 through IC6 — and show average comp per level pulled from our Paylocity pay statements, with a total run-rate for each level.' Starch builds it. You're describing the output you need, not configuring a data model.

We use QuickBooks for financials, but the CFO also wants the headcount budget reconciled against department P&Ls. Can Starch do that?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity data — invoices, bills, payments, journal entries — on a schedule. Note that QuickBooks report views like the built-in P&L report are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue, but you can build an equivalent P&L view from the underlying transaction data Starch syncs. Tell Starch what you need and it builds the reconciliation surface from the synced data.

Is this SOC 2 certified? We're a growth-stage company with investors asking about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you connect payroll systems that contain sensitive compensation data. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for your InfoSec team, that's an honest blocker right now.

The scenario analysis sounds useful, but our finance lead built a model in Excel that the CFO already trusts. Why would I replace it?

You probably don't need to replace it. The value here is that the Starch scenario model pulls live Plaid and Stripe data as its baseline — so when the CFO asks 'what does this hiring plan do to runway as of today?' you're not re-entering last month's actuals into a spreadsheet. The Excel model can stay as the source of CFO truth; Starch gives you a fast answer before that conversation even happens.

Can I share the headcount tracker with the VP of Engineering and VP of People without giving them access to everything else in Starch?

You can share individual apps built in Starch. The headcount tracker is its own surface — you share a link to that app specifically. They see the data you've built the tracker to show; they're not browsing your other Starch apps or raw integrations.