People & HR

How to set compensation bands as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're the one who ends up owning comp band work even though it sits awkwardly between Finance, HR, and the CEO. Right now that means pulling Paylocity or ADP exports into a spreadsheet, cross-referencing Radford or Levels.fyi data you've scraped manually, and then chasing department heads through Slack to get headcount plans confirmed before the numbers are already stale. The last time you did this it took two weeks and three versions of a Google Sheet that no one trusted by the time the CEO signed off. There's no system — there's a spreadsheet, a Notion page someone forgot to update, and you.

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People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live compensation band dashboard that pulls current payroll data from Paylocity or ADP and maps every role against your internal bands, so you can see outliers and compression issues without running a manual export

A budget-to-actuals view that connects your comp bands to real quarterly spend from QuickBooks, so you know the cost of the org structure you're proposing before anyone has to ask Finance

A structured compensation review tracker — roles, levels, current pay, band midpoint, delta, and approval status — that you describe to Starch in plain English and it builds for you

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule — employees, pay statements, org units — so the tracker always reflects actual payroll, not a week-old export. QuickBooks syncs on a schedule for bills, payments, and journal entries so your budget-to-actuals view is grounded in real spend. Stripe syncs on a schedule for revenue and subscription data to anchor the scenario modeling. Market benchmarking sources like Levels.fyi or Radford portals are automated through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a compensation band tracker that shows every active role, their current level, current base salary from our Paylocity data, the target band minimum and midpoint for that level, and a delta column showing how far each person is from midpoint. Group by department. Flag anyone below band minimum in red.

Build a quarterly headcount budget view that pulls our actual salary spend from QuickBooks by department, compares it to the comp bands we've set, and shows total variance per department so I can see where we're over or under our modeled cost before we finalize the org chart.

Show me two scenarios side by side: one where we bring all below-band employees to midpoint this quarter, and one where we phase it over two quarters. For each scenario, show total incremental annual cost, impact on quarterly burn, and updated runway assuming our current Stripe revenue run rate.

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 employee roster, current compensation, org units, and pay statements on a schedule so you have a clean, current dataset to work from.

2 Connect QuickBooks — Starch syncs invoices, bills, payments, and journal entries on a schedule so your comp band work is grounded in what the company is actually spending, not a Finance estimate.

3 Connect Stripe so Scenario Analysis can anchor runway calculations to real revenue, not a slide from last quarter's board deck.

4 Open the Budgeting app and tell Starch to build a headcount cost view by department — describe what you want in plain English and it assembles the table, pulling from your synced QuickBooks and Paylocity data.

5 Describe your compensation band tracker — roles, levels, band minimums and midpoints, current salaries, delta from midpoint, approval workflow — and Starch builds it as a custom app. You don't drag and drop anything; you describe what you want.

6 Import or manually enter your internal band targets by level (e.g., L1–L5 by function) into the tracker. If your benchmarking data lives in a Google Sheet, connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live.

7 Use the Scenario Analysis app to model the cost of closing comp gaps — enter the assumption that all below-band employees move to midpoint and see the impact on burn rate and runway using your live Stripe and Plaid data.

8 Run a second scenario with a phased approach — half the adjustments this quarter, half next — and compare runway side-by-side so you can walk the CEO through the tradeoff in a single view instead of two spreadsheets.

9 For market benchmarking, tell Starch to pull compensation data from Levels.fyi or your comp survey portal through browser automation — it navigates the site, extracts the relevant ranges, and surfaces them in your tracker without you building a scraper.

10 Set a scheduled automation: every week, Starch checks whether any new hires or promotions have landed outside band and sends you a Slack summary of outliers before they become a retention problem.

11 When you're ready to present to the executive team, describe the output you need — 'a one-page summary of comp band gaps by department with cost-to-close and recommended phasing' — and Starch drafts it from your tracker data.

12 Archive the approved bands in Notion — Starch connects to Notion and can write the finalized band structure to a doc so department heads have a single source of truth they can actually find.

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 Compensation Band Review — 150-person Series B company

Sample numbers from a real run

Engineering (L3–L5), 38 employees — avg delta from midpoint	-8,400
Sales (L2–L4), 22 employees — avg delta from midpoint	3,200
G&A (L1–L3), 18 employees — avg delta from midpoint	-5,100
Total incremental annual cost to bring all below-band to midpoint	1,240,000
Total incremental cost — phased over 2 quarters	620,000
Current quarterly burn (from QuickBooks actuals)	3,800,000
Runway impact — immediate full adjustment (months lost)	-1.4

Going into Q2 planning, the CoS pulled the Paylocity sync in Starch and found that 24 of 38 engineers were below their L3–L5 band midpoints by an average of $8,400 annually — mostly people hired during the 2023 hiring freeze when the bands were set conservatively. Bringing them all to midpoint would cost $319,200 in incremental annual salary. G&A had a similar problem: 12 of 18 employees below midpoint by an average of $5,100, adding another $61,200. Sales was actually above midpoint on average — $3,200 over — flagging a potential compression issue with new hires coming in at market. Total cost to close all gaps immediately: $1.24M annually, or about $310K in Q2 alone. Running the Scenario Analysis app with live Stripe revenue ($1.9M MRR) and QuickBooks burn, the immediate adjustment reduced modeled runway from 14.2 months to 12.8 — a real number the CEO could weigh against retention risk. The phased version, $620K in Q2 and the rest in Q3, kept runway above 13 months. The CoS walked into the exec meeting with both scenarios already built, not a request to let Finance model it.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Percentage of employees within band (at or above minimum, at or below maximum) — tracked by department

Cost-to-close comp gaps as a percentage of quarterly burn — the number Finance actually asks about

Runway impact of proposed comp adjustments — modeled against live Stripe and Plaid data, not a static spreadsheet

Time from comp review kick-off to CEO sign-off — a process efficiency metric the CoS owns directly

Number of outlier flags (new hires or promotions landing outside band) caught proactively before they escalate

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Radford / Mercer + Google Sheets

Gives you solid market benchmarking data but you're still manually exporting payroll, building the comparison table yourself, and the whole thing is stale the moment someone gets promoted or a new hire starts.

Carta Total Compensation

Good for equity-heavy compensation benchmarking at venture-backed companies, but doesn't connect to your actual payroll system or model the budget impact against your real QuickBooks spend and runway.

Rippling or Deel analytics

If your HRIS is Rippling or Deel you get some built-in comp analytics, but they don't cross-reference against your financial model or let you build a custom cross-functional view the way Starch does with plain-language app authoring.

Workday Compensation module

Enterprise-grade and deeply integrated with HR workflows, but requires implementation work, admin overhead, and doesn't give a 150-person company's CoS the flexibility to describe a custom comp band tracker in plain English and have it built in minutes.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, scenario planning 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

We use Paylocity — does Starch actually sync our payroll data, or is this just a manual import?

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, org units, pay statements. You don't export a CSV and upload it. The tracker pulls from the sync, so when someone gets a raise or a new hire starts, the data updates without you touching it.

What if our HRIS is ADP instead of Paylocity?

ADP works the same way — Starch connects directly to ADP and syncs workers, org units, and pay statements on a schedule. The comp band tracker you describe works off whichever payroll system you're using.

Can Starch pull in market benchmarking data from Radford or Levels.fyi automatically?

Yes, through browser automation. If you can log into the site and navigate to the data, Starch can automate that — no API needed. It navigates the site, extracts the comp ranges you need, and surfaces them in your tracker. This works for most web-based benchmarking tools.

We're not SOC 2 certified. Should I be running payroll data through Starch?

Honest answer: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. That's worth knowing before you connect payroll data. Some companies are comfortable with that at this stage; others aren't. If your security team requires SOC 2 Type II, that's a real constraint right now.

Our QuickBooks P&L view is something we use for budget comparisons — is that accessible?

One honest limit: QuickBooks report views like the P&L and Transaction List are temporarily disabled while an upstream connector issue gets fixed. Entity-level data — bills, invoices, payments, vendors, journal entries — syncs normally, so your budget-to-actuals comp work can still be grounded in real spend data. The report views will be back; just not today.

Can I build a comp band approval workflow in Starch — so department heads have to sign off before bands are finalized?

Yes. Describe the workflow you want: which roles need approval, who approves them, what the status fields look like, and how you want to be notified when something changes. Starch builds it as a custom app. You can add a Slack notification automation on top — when a department head updates their approval status, Starch sends you a message automatically.

What's the difference between using the Budgeting app and just asking Starch to build me a custom comp tracker?

The Budgeting app is a good starting point if you want a budget-vs-actuals view by category — it's pre-built and ready to connect to your QuickBooks data immediately. But for the actual compensation band tracker (roles, levels, midpoints, deltas, approval status), you'd describe that as a custom app — it goes beyond what the Budgeting template does out of the box. The two work alongside each other: Budgeting for the spend-vs-plan view, custom tracker for the band mechanics.

How long does it actually take to get this set up?

Connecting Paylocity, ADP, QuickBooks, and Stripe takes under an hour if you have credentials handy. Building the comp band tracker app — describing it to Starch and iterating on the output — usually takes another hour or two the first time. Running the Scenario Analysis for the first time is faster because the app is pre-built; you're just adjusting assumptions. You won't have a finished comp review in a day, but you'll have something more useful than your current spreadsheet by the end of the first session.