People & HR

How to plan headcount as Construction and Contractor Founders

People & HRFor Construction and Contractor Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running three jobs at once and headcount planning happens in your head or on a napkin. You know roughly how many framers you need for the Riverside addition starting in six weeks, but figuring out whether your current payroll — across W-2 carpenters, 1099 subs, and that part-time office admin — can actually scale to cover two more jobs without blowing your March cash position means pulling QuickBooks, cross-checking Plaid, and guessing at labor hours from last year's bids. Nobody on your crew does this for you. You do it on Sunday night with a Yellow Pad and hope the numbers hold.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Construction and Contractor Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live labor cost and cash-position view that shows whether your current AR and bank balance can absorb one, two, or three new hires before the next draw hits

A headcount scenario model comparing 'hold crew steady,' 'add one framing sub,' and 'bring on a full-time super' — with runway and burn shown for each path against your actual QuickBooks and Plaid data

A quarterly labor budget tracker that flags when your subcontractor spend is running over on a job-by-job basis before it eats your margin

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

Runway Analysis Scenario Analysis Budgeting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (payroll runs, sub payments, bills, and job-level cost entries) and syncs your Plaid bank feeds on a schedule (balances, transactions). If you use Buildertrend or CoConstruct for job costing, Starch automates those sites through your browser — no API needed — to pull cost-to-complete and change order totals into the same view. Stripe is synced on a schedule if you take draw payments through it.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Plaid bank accounts and QuickBooks. Show me my current monthly labor spend — W-2 payroll plus sub payments — broken out by job, and how many months of cash I have at current burn.

Build me three headcount scenarios: one where I hold crew steady, one where I add a framing sub at $8,500/month, and one where I hire a full-time superintendent at $85,000/year with benefits. Show runway and monthly burn for each, using my actual Stripe draws and Plaid balances as the baseline.

Set up a quarterly labor budget for this year. Pull my historical sub and payroll spend from QuickBooks by category — framing, electrical, plumbing, general labor, admin — and show me a pace indicator per category so I can see which jobs are running over before I cut the next draw check.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks: Starch syncs your chart of accounts, bills, vendor payments, and payroll runs on a schedule — this gives you the labor cost history you need as a baseline.

2 Connect Plaid: Starch syncs your business checking and any draw accounts on a schedule so your cash position is live, not last month's bank statement.

3 If you track job costs in Buildertrend or CoConstruct, tell Starch your login and it automates those sites through your browser to pull cost-to-complete by job — no API required.

4 Open the Runway Analysis app. Starch calculates your real monthly burn from actual transactions — payroll, sub invoices, materials, overhead — and shows how many months of cash you have at current pace.

5 Pull up your labor cost breakdown. Tell Starch: 'Break my last six months of QuickBooks vendor payments and payroll by category — framing subs, MEP subs, W-2 labor, admin — and show me the monthly average per job.' This becomes your headcount baseline.

6 Open Scenario Analysis. Enter your three headcount paths in plain language — hold steady, add a framing sub, hire a super — and Starch adjusts burn and runway for each using your actual baseline numbers from QuickBooks and Plaid.

7 Check the break-even date for each scenario. If adding the super pushes your runway under three months before the next big draw, you'll see it here before you make the offer.

8 Open the Budgeting app. Set your quarterly labor budget by category using Starch's suggested allocations from your historical spend — it pre-fills the buckets so you're not guessing.

9 Connect any job-level budget line items. Tell Starch: 'For each active job in QuickBooks, create a sub-budget showing budgeted versus actual sub costs and flag any job where sub spend is more than 10% over budget.'

10 Set a weekly check-in. Tell Starch: 'Every Friday morning, pull this week's QuickBooks sub payments and payroll, compare against my quarterly labor budget, and Slack me a summary with any jobs running over.' Starch automates this through your connected Slack.

11 When a new job is awarded, add it to your scenario model. Prompt Starch: 'Add a new $320,000 residential remodel starting April 15th with estimated labor cost of $95,000. Show me how this changes my runway and whether I need to add crew or can use existing subs.'

12 Review the full picture before every hiring decision: runway from Runway Analysis, scenario comparison from Scenario Analysis, and category-level pace from Budgeting — all in one tab, not three spreadsheets.

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

Ridgeline Contracting — April 2026 headcount decision

Sample numbers from a real run

Current bank balance (Plaid)	87,400
Monthly W-2 payroll (2 carpenters + admin)	19,200
Monthly sub spend — avg last 6 months (QuickBooks)	31,500
Monthly overhead (insurance, truck, tools)	6,800
Total monthly burn — current crew	57,500
Runway at current burn (months)	1
Expected draw on Riverside job — May 15	48,000
Runway including May draw	2
Framing sub cost if added — monthly	8,500
Runway with framing sub added (months)	1

Ridgeline is a 12-person GC running three residential jobs. The owner, Marcus, thinks he needs to add a framing sub to hit his June deadline on the Riverside addition, but isn't sure the cash position supports it. He connects QuickBooks and Plaid to Starch and runs the Runway Analysis app — it shows $87,400 in the bank against $57,500/month in total burn, which is only 1.5 months of runway before the May 15 draw. In Scenario Analysis, Marcus enters 'add framing sub at $8,500/month starting April 22.' The model shows this drops runway to just under one month before the draw hits — tight, but the $48,000 Riverside draw on May 15 buys another two months. The riskier question is what happens if the draw is delayed two weeks. Marcus prompts Starch: 'What if the May draw is delayed to June 1 instead of May 15 — show me the cash gap.' Starch shows a $6,800 shortfall in the last week of May. Marcus decides to wait until May 1 to bring the sub on, not April 22, and uses the Budgeting app to flag a hard cap on framing spend at $25,500 for the quarter. He wouldn't have seen the delay risk without running the scenario — the napkin math would have told him he was fine.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Monthly labor cost as a percentage of total job revenue — target under 35% for residential work

Cash runway in weeks, not months — most small GCs live draw-to-draw and need weekly visibility

Sub spend versus budgeted by job — which jobs are running over on subcontractor costs before the final invoice

Days of AR outstanding versus payroll due date — can this month's receivables cover next Friday's payroll

Cost-to-complete variance — what the job was bid at versus what it's tracking to after change orders and overruns

Comparison

What this replaces

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

QuickBooks + Excel

You already have the QuickBooks data; the problem is that turning it into a headcount scenario takes two hours of export-and-paste every time something changes, and the spreadsheet is stale the moment you close it.

Procore

Procore's built for commercial shops with a dedicated PM and an accounting team; the per-seat cost and setup time don't make sense for a crew under 20, and it still won't model your cash runway against headcount scenarios.

Buildertrend or CoConstruct

Good for job scheduling and client-facing docs, but the financial reporting is shallow — you can't build a multi-scenario headcount model or see your total burn rate across all jobs in one view.

Hiring a part-time controller or bookkeeper

A solid controller would do this well, but you're looking at $2,000–$4,000/month for someone who updates the model when you ask, not in real time when your bank balance changes.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — runway analysis, scenario planning, quarterly budgeting 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

My job costs are in Buildertrend, not QuickBooks. Can Starch still pull them?

Yes. Starch automates Buildertrend through your browser — no API needed — and can pull cost-to-complete, change order totals, and budget-versus-actual by job. You tell Starch what you want to see, it logs in and gets it. The QuickBooks sync handles your bills, payroll, and vendor payments on the accounting side; Buildertrend handles the field-side job costing. Both feed into the same view.

Does Starch store my bank data? Is this safe for a small business?

Starch connects to your bank through Plaid, which is the same connection layer your bank's own app uses. Your credentials stay with Plaid; Starch receives read-only transaction and balance data. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing if your GC has compliance requirements, though most residential and small commercial shops don't. The data is used to power your dashboards and nothing else.

I don't use Stripe — I take draw payments by check or ACH directly to my bank. Will runway analysis still work?

Yes. The Runway Analysis app uses Plaid bank feed data as its primary cash source, so draws that hit your checking account show up automatically regardless of how they were paid. Stripe is an optional addition if you invoice through it; it's not required.

Can Starch tell me which specific jobs are profitable after change orders, not just my total burn?

You can build a custom app for this. Describe it to Starch: 'Build me a job profitability tracker that pulls each job's contract value and change orders from Buildertrend and matches them against sub payments and material costs from QuickBooks, then shows gross margin per job.' Starch builds the app from that description. The pre-built Budgeting and Runway apps give you the company-level view; the custom job profitability app gives you the job-level view.

What if I want to see what happens if a big job gets canceled — not just if I add headcount?

That's exactly what Scenario Analysis is for. Prompt it: 'Remove the $480,000 Oak Hill job from my revenue plan and show me how runway and burn change under my current crew size.' You can combine shocks — lose a job and add a hire — and see the combined effect. The baseline always reflects your actual QuickBooks and Plaid numbers, so the scenarios aren't hypothetical; they're your real cost structure with one variable changed.

QuickBooks report views like P&L aren't working — is that a Starch issue?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data (bills, invoices, vendor payments, payroll journal entries) on a schedule, and that's what powers the headcount and budgeting views here. The pre-built QuickBooks P&L report view is temporarily disabled pending a fix on the connector — that's a known limit. For job-level P&L, the workaround is building a custom app that pulls entity data and calculates margin directly, which Starch can do from your bill and invoice data today.