People & HR

How to set compensation bands as Small Finance Teams

People & HRFor Small Finance Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're the person HR calls when they need someone to 'sanity check' the comp bands the People team just drafted in a Google Sheet. The problem: you have payroll data in ADP or Paylocity, headcount costs rolling through QuickBooks or NetSuite, and market benchmarks sitting in a PDF someone downloaded from Radford or Levels.fyi six months ago. None of it talks to each other. You end up manually cross-referencing spreadsheet tabs, pulling payroll runs by job code, and trying to figure out whether a proposed band for a Senior Software Engineer actually fits inside the headcount budget you already approved. It takes half a day you don't have, and the output is still a static spreadsheet that goes stale the moment someone gets promoted.

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People & HRFor Small Finance Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live compensation band tracker that pulls actual payroll costs from ADP or Paylocity alongside your approved headcount budget from QuickBooks or NetSuite, so you can see at a glance whether proposed bands are fundable

A structured band-setting workflow that compares current salaries by level and department against proposed ranges, flags outliers, and shows the total annualized cost delta before HR sends offers

A repeatable process that takes comp review from a multi-tab spreadsheet exercise to a 30-minute finance sign-off with a documented audit trail

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 Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity payroll data on a schedule (employees, payroll runs, pay statements) and your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, bills, journal entries, vendor payments) — both refreshed automatically so your band analysis always reflects real numbers, not last month's export. Market benchmark data from external sources like Levels.fyi or Radford PDFs can be pulled in through browser automation — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a compensation band tracker that shows current salary ranges by job level and department, pulls actual payroll costs from Paylocity, and compares them against our approved headcount budget from QuickBooks. Flag anyone whose current salary falls outside the proposed band for their level.

Create a knowledge base page for our compensation band policy that stores the approved ranges by level, links to the underlying assumptions, and auto-detects when the data is more than 90 days old so we know when to refresh.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity to Starch (scheduled sync) — Starch pulls employee records, payroll runs, and pay statements automatically. This gives you actual current compensation by person, job code, and department without touching an export.

2 Connect QuickBooks or NetSuite to Starch (scheduled sync) — Starch pulls your approved headcount budget line items and any payroll-related journal entries so you have the finance-approved envelope to work within.

3 Describe your comp band tracker to Starch in plain language: 'Show me a table of all active employees grouped by department and job level, with their current salary, the proposed band min/mid/max for their level, and a flag if they're below band, in band, or above band.'

4 Add the annualized cost layer: 'Add a summary row per department showing total current payroll cost, total cost if everyone is brought to band midpoint, and the variance. Pull the approved headcount budget from QuickBooks for each department and show the remaining budget headroom.'

5 For any market benchmarking data you don't have in a connected system (e.g., Levels.fyi, Radford, Mercer), describe the sources to Starch — it can automate retrieval through your browser and bring the numbers into your tracker without needing a formal API connection.

6 Use Starch's Budgeting app (start from the quarterly-budgeting template or fork it for headcount) to model the total compensation cost of the proposed bands — plug in the new min/mid/max per level and see what full adoption costs versus your current run rate.

7 Run a 'what if' pass: 'Show me what our total payroll cost looks like if we bring all below-band employees to the band minimum versus the midpoint, and compare that to our approved headcount budget for the next two quarters.'

8 Document the approved bands in Starch's Knowledge Management app so there's a single source of truth HR, recruiting, and finance all reference — no more emailing the latest version of the spreadsheet around.

9 Set a staleness alert in Knowledge Management: 'Flag this comp band page if it hasn't been updated in 90 days' — so you're not accidentally hiring against bands that predate your last funding round.

10 Share the tracker output with the CPO or Head of People as a live Starch view — they see the same numbers you see, updated from the same payroll sync, without needing a new export from you.

11 At each comp review cycle (annual, or after a funding round), refresh the band assumptions and re-run the variance analysis — the connections are already live, so the update takes minutes, not a half-day rebuild.

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 — Engineering Leveling

Sample numbers from a real run

L3 Software Engineer — current avg salary	142,000
L3 Software Engineer — proposed band midpoint	155,000
L3 employees below band (6 of 11)	6
Cost to bring all below-band L3s to midpoint	78,000
Approved engineering headcount budget (remaining, Q2–Q3)	210,000
Budget headroom after band correction	132,000

Before the Q2 engineering comp review, HR sent over a Google Sheet with proposed bands for L2 through L5. Your job: figure out whether the numbers are fundable and flag anyone who'd immediately be out of band. Starch already had Paylocity syncing nightly, so you pulled all 38 engineering employees with their current base salaries, job levels, and department codes in about 90 seconds. The QuickBooks sync showed the approved headcount budget line for Engineering at $840,000 for the half. Running the band comparison surfaced that 6 of 11 L3 engineers were below the proposed $145,000–$165,000 band — a total correction cost of $78,000 annualized if you brought everyone to midpoint. Against the $210,000 remaining in the approved headcount envelope, that's fundable with $132,000 left for backfill or new headcount. You shared the live Starch view with the CPO in 20 minutes rather than rebuilding the spreadsheet from scratch. HR approved the bands with the finance sign-off already attached.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Percentage of employees within approved compensation band by level and department

Annualized cost to close below-band gaps (to minimum vs. midpoint) vs. approved headcount budget

Headcount budget headroom remaining after proposed band corrections

Days since comp band documentation was last updated (staleness tracking)

Payroll cost as a percentage of total operating expense, tracked monthly via QuickBooks or NetSuite sync

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + Paylocity export

You're manually exporting payroll runs, pasting into a master tab, and reconciling against a budget spreadsheet that's already two weeks old — fine once a year, but breaks down the moment someone gets a raise mid-cycle or a new hire starts.

Lattice or Radford (comp management platforms)

Purpose-built for HR to manage bands and run benchmarking surveys, but they don't connect to your actual QuickBooks or NetSuite budget, so finance still has to do a separate reconciliation pass to confirm the bands are fundable.

NetSuite or QuickBooks native reporting

Great for seeing what you've already spent on payroll in the ledger; terrible at forward-looking 'what does adopting these bands cost' analysis or showing salary by employee level without a custom saved search someone has to maintain.

HR consultant or comp analyst

Delivers a polished benchmarking report, but it's a point-in-time deliverable — you still own the internal reconciliation against your budget, and you're back to the spreadsheet the moment headcount changes.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, knowledge management 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

Starch can see individual employee salaries from Paylocity — how sensitive is that data?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing upfront. The Paylocity sync pulls employee records and pay statements into Starch's database for your use. If your security policy requires SOC 2 Type II before connecting payroll data, that's a real constraint right now. For teams comfortable with the current posture, the data is scoped to your Starch workspace and not shared externally.

We use ADP instead of Paylocity — does Starch sync that too?

Yes. Starch connects directly to ADP and syncs workers, org units, and pay statements on a schedule. The setup and the resulting comp band tracker work the same way — just connect ADP instead of Paylocity when you're wiring up the integration.

Our comp benchmarking data comes from a Radford or Mercer survey PDF, not a live system. Can Starch use that?

Starch can't query a PDF directly from a scheduled sync, but you have two options: manually paste the benchmark ranges into your comp band tracker as reference data, or — if the benchmarking provider has a web portal you log into — Starch can automate retrieval through your browser with no API needed. For most small finance teams, pasting the benchmark numbers once per cycle and letting Starch handle the live payroll and budget data is the right split.

Can I see QuickBooks P&L line items in the same view as payroll costs?

Yes for entity-level data — bills, invoices, vendor payments, journal entries, and headcount budget lines all sync normally. One honest note: QuickBooks report views (the pre-built P&L report, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue. If you need the standard P&L view format, build it from the underlying entity data Starch already has — describe the layout you want and Starch assembles it.

Will this replace our HR team's comp tool or their spreadsheet process?

No, and it shouldn't. Starch is doing the finance side of the problem: is this fundable, who's out of band relative to budget, what does the delta cost? HR still owns the band philosophy, the benchmarking methodology, and the actual offer letters. What Starch removes is the back-and-forth where HR sends you a spreadsheet, you rebuild it in your budget model, and three rounds of email later you're both looking at different numbers.

How long does it take to set this up for the first time?

Connecting Paylocity and QuickBooks (or NetSuite) each takes a few minutes once you have your credentials. Describing the comp band tracker to Starch and getting a working first version typically takes 20–30 minutes, including one or two iterations to get the column layout and flagging logic right. The first comp review cycle where you run it end-to-end will surface any edge cases — job codes that don't map cleanly, departments that straddle multiple budget lines — and you tune from there.