People & HR

How to plan headcount as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're a 12-person consultancy and headcount planning means exporting your HubSpot pipeline to a Google Sheet, guessing which deals will close in time to justify the next hire, and cross-referencing that against a Harvest utilization export you had to download manually. You do this quarterly, it takes most of a Friday, and the moment you finalize the model your pipeline changes. You don't have a finance hire. You don't have an HR system. You have a spreadsheet that's already wrong by the time you share it with your co-founder, and a gut feeling about whether you can afford a senior consultant in Q3.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live headcount model that pulls your actual Stripe revenue, Plaid bank balances, and HubSpot pipeline into one place — so you can see exactly how many hires your current cash and projected revenue can support, updated daily.

A scenario planner that shows you what happens to your runway if you hire two seniors in Q2 versus waiting until Q3, with your real burn rate as the baseline — not a number you typed in by hand.

An automated weekly summary that tells you your current utilization trend, pipeline coverage, and cash position before you walk into Monday morning — no spreadsheet, no manual export.

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 Stripe data and your Plaid bank transactions on a schedule — those are the live actuals that power the burn and runway calculations. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your deals pipeline live when the headcount model needs weighted pipeline revenue. Harvest and Float, if you use them, are reachable through Starch's integration catalog or automated through your browser — no separate API setup needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a headcount planning dashboard that shows our current monthly burn, Stripe MRR, and Plaid cash balance. Add a section that calculates how many months of runway we have at different headcount levels — current team, +1 senior hire in Q2, +2 hires in Q3. Pull actuals from Plaid and Stripe.

Create a scenario model comparing three futures: (1) we hire a senior consultant in April, (2) we wait until July, (3) we add a project manager in April instead. For each scenario, show runway, monthly net burn, and break-even assuming our current HubSpot pipeline converts at 35%.

Build a quarterly budget view that shows our actual spend by category — payroll, contractors, software, travel, client entertainment — versus a budget I'll set. Flag anything more than 10% over pace. Pull actuals from Plaid.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid in Starch so your bank account transactions sync automatically on a schedule — this becomes the ground truth for payroll, contractor payments, software spend, and overhead. No manual exports.

2 Connect Stripe so Starch can pull your MRR, invoice history, and cash collections on a schedule. For a consultancy this is your retainer revenue and project billings.

3 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. The agent will query your deals live — stage, value, expected close date — so your headcount model reflects your actual pipeline, not last week's gut feel.

4 Start with the Runway Analysis app. Out of the box it combines Stripe revenue and Plaid transactions to show net burn and cash months remaining. Verify the numbers match what you'd expect from your own mental model.

5 Describe your headcount planning dashboard to Starch in plain language. Tell it which Plaid categories map to payroll versus overhead, what a new senior hire costs all-in, and how you want to see the scenarios laid out.

6 Open the Scenario Analysis app and describe the specific decisions you're weighing — April hire versus July hire, one senior versus one PM. Wire in your HubSpot pipeline conversion rate as an assumption so projected revenue moves with deal probability.

7 Set up a Budgeting view that tracks your quarterly spend by category against targets you define. Starch auto-suggests allocations from your Plaid history so you're not starting from a blank number.

8 Add a calculated field for effective utilization: take your Stripe billings for the month, divide by your headcount-times-target-billable-hours, and surface that as a percentage. Describe this to Starch and it builds the formula into your dashboard.

9 Set up a weekly automation — describe it to Starch as: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull my current Plaid balance, Stripe MRR for the trailing 30 days, and any HubSpot deals that moved stage this week. Slack me a three-paragraph summary with runway, utilization trend, and pipeline coverage.' Starch schedules and runs it.

10 Share view-only access to the headcount scenario model with your co-founder or fractional CFO so the conversation about hiring timing is grounded in the same numbers, not two different spreadsheets.

11 Revisit the scenario model each time a major deal closes or falls out of the pipeline. Because HubSpot is queried live, updating your assumptions takes a prompt, not a rebuild.

12 At the end of each quarter, export the budget-vs-actual from Starch and use it as the input for your next planning cycle — the history is already there, categorized, with no manual cleanup.

See this running on Starch

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

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 Hire Decision — 12-person consultancy, April planning cycle

Sample numbers from a real run

Plaid cash balance (operating account)	387,000
Stripe MRR (retainers + project billings)	94,000
Monthly payroll + contractor cost (current team)	71,000
Software, travel, overhead (Plaid categorized)	8,400
Net monthly burn (current)	14,600
Implied runway at current burn	2,650
Cost of one senior hire (fully loaded monthly)	12,500
Projected net burn post-hire (no new revenue)	27,100
HubSpot pipeline — weighted value (35% close rate)	210,000

Your Starch runway dashboard shows $387k in the operating account and $94k in Stripe MRR against $79.4k in total monthly costs — about 26 months of runway at current burn, which feels comfortable. But the scenario model tells a different story when you layer in the April hire: a senior consultant at $12.5k fully loaded per month drops net burn to $27.1k immediately, cutting implied runway to about 14 months if the HubSpot pipeline doesn't convert. The weighted pipeline value is $210k — but that's spread across Q2 and Q3 closes. Starch builds a scenario that assumes 35% close rate on Q2 deals only ($73.5k in new ARR, or $6.1k/month incremental Stripe revenue starting June), showing the April hire breaks even by August and extends to a July hire scenario where you're in a safer position but losing six weeks of onboarding time on a deal you're 80% confident will close. You share the Starch link with your co-founder. The conversation takes fifteen minutes instead of a Thursday afternoon.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net monthly burn (Plaid actuals minus Stripe collections, not your P&L estimate)

Effective billable utilization rate (Stripe billings ÷ team capacity × billable hours target)

Pipeline coverage ratio (weighted HubSpot ARR ÷ next-quarter cost base)

Cash months remaining at current burn and at post-hire burn

Payroll as a percentage of revenue (the number that tells you when you're over-hired before the bank account does)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Kantata / Projector / Deltek

Built for 200-person firms with a dedicated ops team; implementation takes a quarter and the pricing reflects it — not practical for a 12-person consultancy that needs an answer this week.

HubSpot + Harvest + Float + Google Sheets (your current stack)

Each tool does its job but the headcount model still lives in a spreadsheet you export manually; there's no version that updates itself when a deal closes or payroll runs.

Mosaic or Jirav (FP&A tools)

Good financial modeling platforms, but they're designed around an existing finance hire who will own the model — for a founder doing this themselves, the setup cost is real and the ongoing maintenance requires someone who thinks in variance analysis.

QuickBooks + a fractional CFO spreadsheet

Accurate actuals once the books are closed, but you're always 3-4 weeks behind and the headcount scenario model is a one-off deliverable that goes stale the moment something changes in the pipeline.

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 pipeline is in a Google Sheet, not HubSpot. Can I still build a headcount model?

Yes. Google Sheets is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent can query your pipeline data live when your headcount model runs. You'll describe the columns that matter (deal name, value, expected close, probability) and Starch incorporates them into the scenario calculations. You can also migrate the Google Sheet data into a Starch app and manage your pipeline there going forward.

We use Harvest for time tracking and Float for capacity planning. Does Starch replace those?

It doesn't have to. Harvest and Float are reachable through Starch's integration catalog or through browser automation. If you want Starch to pull Harvest actuals into your utilization calculation, describe that and it builds the connection. Most consultancies running Starch keep their existing tools and use Starch as the layer that combines them into a single headcount view — you stop exporting manually, but you don't have to switch anything.

How current is the data? I need this to reflect this week's pipeline, not last month's.

Stripe and Plaid sync on a schedule, so your revenue and bank data updates automatically — typically within 24 hours. HubSpot is queried live from Starch's integration catalog each time your dashboard or automation runs, so your pipeline reflects whatever state it's in at that moment. If a deal closes on Wednesday, your Thursday morning Slack summary will include it.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We handle sensitive client data.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you put client delivery data or personally identifiable information into the platform. For headcount planning, the data you're connecting is your own financial and pipeline data, which most founders are comfortable with at this stage. SOC 2 certification is on the roadmap.

We use QuickBooks as our accounting system. Can Starch pull our actual payroll and contractor costs from there?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, bills, vendor payments, and journal entries all come through. One current limitation: the QuickBooks report views (like the built-in P&L report) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector fix in progress, but entity-level data — the individual bills and payments that make up your cost base — syncs normally. For headcount planning purposes, that's what you need.

Can I model different utilization assumptions, not just hire timing?

Yes. Describe the assumptions you want to test — 'what if we raise our blended rate by 15%,' 'what if utilization drops to 70% in summer,' 'what if our largest retainer doesn't renew' — and Starch builds those as scenario branches alongside your hire timing scenarios. The baseline always reflects your actual Stripe and Plaid numbers, so the scenarios show you the delta from where you actually are, not from a number you estimated.