People & HR

How to plan headcount as Small Finance Teams

People & HRFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're a three-person finance team supporting 200 employees, and headcount planning lives in a Google Sheet that nobody trusts by the time it reaches the CFO. You pull salary data from Paylocity or ADP, benefits costs from a separate HR export, open-req assumptions from a deck the hiring manager sent two weeks ago, and cash impact from your own QuickBooks or NetSuite close. Every time a hire date slips or a role gets re-leveled, you rebuild the whole model manually. By the time you've reconciled loaded comp against actual payroll runs and stress-tested the runway impact, close week is over and the CFO wants to know what happens if you add two engineers in Q3 instead of Q4.

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People & HRFor Small Finance Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live headcount model that pulls actual payroll spend from Paylocity or ADP and actual cash from Plaid or QuickBooks, so your loaded-comp numbers match the books without a manual reconcile

Scenario comparisons — conservative, base, and aggressive hiring plans side-by-side — showing runway, burn rate, and break-even under each hiring cadence, built from your real baseline

A recurring update that refreshes the model every payroll cycle so the CFO is always looking at the same numbers finance is, not a three-week-old snapshot pasted into a slide

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

Scenario Analysis Runway Analysis Budgeting

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity payroll run and employee data on a schedule, your Plaid bank transactions on a schedule, and your QuickBooks or NetSuite entity-level data (journal entries, bills, payments) on a schedule. Open-role assumptions and hire-date inputs are entered directly in Starch. No spreadsheet exports, no manual uploads between systems.

Prompts to copy

Build me a headcount scenario model with three hiring plans — conservative (2 net new hires in H2), base (5 net new), and aggressive (8 net new, including 2 engineers in Q3). Pull our actual cash burn from Plaid and our current payroll run totals from Paylocity. For each scenario, show runway in months, monthly net burn, and the month we hit break-even or run out of cash.

Create a runway dashboard that separates people costs from non-people costs. Pull payroll from Paylocity and bank transactions from Plaid. Flag any month where people costs exceed 65% of total cash out.

Set up a quarterly headcount budget by department — Engineering, Sales, G&A — using our actual Q1 payroll from Paylocity as the baseline. Track variance against plan as each new hire goes active.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity (or ADP) in Starch — Starch syncs your employees, payroll runs, and benefits data on a schedule. This becomes the source of truth for actual loaded comp, not an HR export you requested last Tuesday.

2 Connect Plaid so Starch syncs your bank transactions on a schedule. This gives the headcount model a cash baseline that matches your actual account balances, not a QuickBooks balance that's two days behind.

3 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite — Starch syncs invoices, bills, journal entries, and payments on a schedule. Use this to cross-check that payroll entries hitting the GL match what Paylocity reported.

4 Open the Scenario Analysis app and describe your three hiring plans in plain language — start dates, departments, fully-loaded cost assumptions per role. Starch uses your Plaid and Paylocity data as the baseline; you only type in the delta assumptions.

5 For each scenario, review the runway, monthly burn, and break-even output. Adjust a single assumption — for example, push the Q3 engineering hire to Q4 — and re-run. This takes seconds rather than rebuilding a tab in Sheets.

6 Open the Runway Analysis app to see net burn split between people costs and non-people costs. If payroll is crowding out other spend categories, this surfaces it before you've already made the offer.

7 Open the Budgeting app and set a quarterly headcount budget by department using Q1 Paylocity actuals as the base. As the quarter progresses and new payroll runs sync, Starch automatically shows variance against plan — no manual update required.

8 Ask Starch a one-off question mid-close: 'What is our current fully-loaded monthly cost per employee in Engineering vs. G&A, based on the last two Paylocity payroll runs?' Get the answer without building a pivot table.

9 Set up a weekly automation: every Monday, Starch pulls the latest Paylocity payroll run, compares people costs to the headcount budget, and sends you a Slack message with any department that has drifted more than 5% from plan.

10 When the CFO asks 'what happens to runway if we make the two VP-level hires we're considering?' — open the Scenario Analysis app, describe the loaded comp assumptions, and show the side-by-side output in the next 10 minutes rather than the next two days.

11 Before the board meeting, export the headcount scenario comparison from Starch and pair it with the Runway Analysis output. The numbers are already reconciled to your books; you're not manually checking whether finance and HR are looking at the same payroll total.

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

Q2 2026 Headcount Plan — May Board Prep

Sample numbers from a real run

Engineering payroll (actual, Q1 Paylocity avg)	187,400
Sales payroll (actual, Q1 Paylocity avg)	94,200
G&A payroll (actual, Q1 Paylocity avg)	61,500
Benefits load (18% blended, Paylocity)	61,614
Base scenario — 5 net new hires H2 loaded cost	312,000
Aggressive scenario — 8 net new hires H2 loaded cost	499,200
Current monthly net burn (Plaid)	218,000
Cash on hand (Plaid, May 1)	4,100,000

Going into the May board meeting, the finance team has $4.1M in the bank per Plaid and a $218K monthly net burn — about 18.8 months of runway at current pace. The CFO wants to see what happens under two hiring plans. In Starch's Scenario Analysis app, the team describes the base plan: 5 net new hires in H2, blended fully-loaded cost of $312K additional annualized spend. Starch runs the projection against the Plaid cash baseline and Paylocity actuals: runway drops to 14.1 months. The aggressive plan — 8 net new hires including two senior ICs at $180K base — adds $499K annualized and brings runway to 11.4 months, which is below the internal 12-month floor. The conservative plan (2 hires, focus on engineering backfill) keeps runway at 17.2 months. All three scenarios are live in Starch; when the board asks to adjust the Q3 engineering hire timing by one quarter, the team re-runs in the room rather than promising a follow-up model by Friday. The Budgeting app shows that Engineering is already tracking 6% over its Q1 headcount budget due to a mid-quarter contractor conversion — a variance that would have been invisible until the QuickBooks close if Paylocity weren't syncing on a schedule.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Monthly fully-loaded cost per employee by department (Engineering, Sales, G&A)

Runway in months under each headcount scenario (conservative / base / aggressive)

People costs as a percentage of total monthly cash out

Headcount budget variance by department vs. Paylocity actuals

Break-even month under each hiring plan

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets headcount model

Gives you full flexibility but requires manual data pulls from Paylocity, QuickBooks, and Plaid every time you update; the model is only as current as whoever last touched it, and reconciling three sources by hand during close week is where errors happen.

Workday Adaptive Planning or Anaplan

Purpose-built for headcount planning at scale, but implementation takes months, requires a dedicated admin, and is priced for companies 5-10x your size — you'll spend more time configuring it than your team saves in the first year.

Rippling or Gusto built-in reporting

Good for payroll-side visibility within the HRIS, but doesn't connect to your cash position or GL, so you still have to manually bridge people costs to runway and board-level burn figures.

Excel + CFO-built model

Works until the CFO leaves, someone overwrites a formula, or you need to run a scenario at 9pm before a board call and the file is on someone else's laptop.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, runway analysis, 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

Does Starch actually sync payroll data from Paylocity, or does it just query it live?

Starch syncs your Paylocity employee and payroll run data on a schedule, so the numbers are sitting in Starch and ready when your headcount model runs — you're not waiting on a live API call every time the CFO pulls up the dashboard.

We use ADP, not Paylocity. Does this still work?

Yes. Starch syncs ADP workers, org units, and pay statements on a schedule the same way it does for Paylocity. The headcount model and scenario comparisons work the same either way.

Our QuickBooks report views are what we normally use for payroll expense — can Starch pull those?

Starch syncs QuickBooks entity-level data — bills, invoices, journal entries, payments, vendors — on a schedule, and those will reflect payroll entries as they hit your GL. Report views (P&L summary, Transaction List) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue; entity-level data syncs normally and covers most headcount cost analysis.

Can Starch pull open-req data from Greenhouse or Lever so I'm not typing hire date assumptions manually?

Greenhouse and Lever are both reachable from Starch's integration catalog, and the agent can query them live when your headcount app runs. You'd describe what you want — 'pull open reqs from Greenhouse, show expected start dates and departments, and feed those into the base scenario as planned hires' — and Starch builds the connection.

We're not SOC 2 certified — is Starch?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement from your legal or security team before connecting payroll or banking data, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

What if I want to include contractor spend in the headcount model, not just W-2 payroll?

Contractor payments typically show up as bills or vendor payments in QuickBooks or NetSuite, and Starch syncs both on a schedule. You can tell Starch: 'include all vendor payments tagged as contractor labor in the people-cost line of the headcount model' and it will pull them alongside payroll.

How does this compare to just building the model in Sheets and refreshing it every week?

The Sheets model works until it doesn't — a formula breaks, someone edits the wrong cell during close, or your Paylocity export and your QuickBooks close are on different cutoff dates and you're presenting a $40K variance you can't explain. Starch syncs all three sources on a schedule and keeps them reconciled; you're not the one manually bridging them the night before a board call.