Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write an exec brief as Small HR Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You need to brief the CFO or CEO on a headcount decision, a benefits change, or a compliance issue — and you have 48 hours to pull it together. The underlying data lives in three places: Paylocity for payroll actuals, BambooHR for headcount and org structure, and a Notion doc someone updated six months ago. You export CSVs, paste numbers into a Google Doc, write three paragraphs, realize the headcount number is wrong, go back to Paylocity, fix it, reformat everything. The exec gets a wall of text that took you a full day to produce. There's no template, no repeatable process, and every brief looks different depending on who's asking.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A connected data surface that pulls current headcount, payroll run totals, and org-unit breakdowns from Paylocity so your brief numbers are always from the live source — not last Tuesday's CSV export

A Meeting Notes app that captures every HR leadership sync and surfaces the decisions and open items you need to reference when writing the brief

A repeatable briefing workflow where you describe what you need in plain language and Starch drafts a structured exec brief — with real numbers, context from your last three meetings, and a clear ask — in under 10 minutes

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

Knowledge Management Meeting Notes Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, pay statements, org units, and payroll runs — so headcount and cost figures in every brief are pulled from a live source. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries your playbooks and policies live when drafting context sections. Meeting Notes captures HR leadership syncs and stores transcripts and action items in Starch, giving the brief-drafting agent access to recent decisions without you having to summarize them manually.

Prompts to copy

Pull headcount by department from my Paylocity sync, total payroll run cost for Q1, and any open roles flagged in our last three HR leadership meetings. Draft a 1-page exec brief for the CFO recommending we backfill the two open engineering roles before Q3. Include a cost impact line using current average fully-loaded salary from payroll actuals.

Summarize the last four HR sync meetings and extract every action item that's still open. Group them by owner and flag anything that's been open for more than 2 weeks.

Draft a follow-up email to the CFO summarizing the headcount brief I just sent, the key number ($340K annual cost to backfill both roles), and the decision I need by end of week.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity as a scheduled-sync provider — Starch will pull employees, org units, pay statements, and payroll runs on a recurring schedule so your headcount and cost data is always current when you go to write a brief.

2 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query your HR playbooks, org charts, and benefit summaries live when it needs context for a brief.

3 Set up Meeting Notes for your recurring HR leadership syncs — invite the Starch meeting bot or paste transcripts — so decisions and open items are captured automatically and searchable.

4 Install the Knowledge Management starter app and point it at your Notion workspace; use it to organize compensation bands, benefits FAQs, and onboarding policies so the brief-drafting agent has structured context to pull from.

5 When a brief request comes in — from the CFO, a department head, or yourself — open Starch and describe the brief in plain language: topic, audience, the decision you need them to make, and any numbers you want included.

6 Starch queries your Paylocity sync for the relevant headcount or payroll figures, pulls recent meeting notes for context, and checks your Notion policies if the brief touches compliance or benefits.

7 Review the draft — check the numbers against your Paylocity data (Starch will cite the source), tighten the recommendation section, and adjust the tone for the specific exec.

8 Use the Email Agent to draft the covering note that goes with the brief — describe who you're sending to, the key ask, and the deadline, and it will draft a clean, direct email you can send in one click.

9 File the final brief in your Knowledge Management app so future you (or your HR backfill) can find it when the same question comes up in six months.

10 After the exec meeting, run Meeting Notes on the follow-up call and have Starch extract the decision and any new action items — appended to the same brief record so there's a complete audit trail.

11 Set a recurring automation: every Monday, Starch checks for open action items from the last 30 days of HR meeting notes that haven't been resolved and Slacks you a summary — so nothing from a brief discussion gets dropped.

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

April 2026 Backfill Decision Brief — Engineering Headcount

Sample numbers from a real run

Current engineering headcount (Paylocity, April 1)	14
Open roles flagged in last 3 HR syncs	2
Average fully-loaded salary, engineering (Paylocity actuals)	162,000
Annualized cost to backfill both roles	324,000
Q1 payroll run — engineering department total	588,000

The CFO asked on a Thursday for a headcount brief by Monday. Both numbers she needed — current engineering headcount and the cost to backfill two open roles — lived in Paylocity. Normally that would mean logging into Paylocity, exporting two reports, reconciling them against the org chart in BambooHR (where someone had already archived one of the open roles by mistake), and then writing a brief from scratch in Google Docs. Instead: Starch queried the Paylocity sync directly and returned 14 active engineering employees and a Q1 payroll run of $588K for that department. It pulled the average fully-loaded salary from pay statement actuals — $162K — and calculated the annualized backfill cost at $324K for two roles. It then searched the last three HR leadership meeting transcripts in Meeting Notes and found that the VP of Engineering had flagged both roles as 'business-critical' on March 18. That context went into the recommendation section automatically. The draft brief was ready in 8 minutes. The covering email — 'Here's the headcount brief you asked for. The ask is a go/no-go on the two engineering backfills before Q3 planning locks on May 1. Cost impact is $324K annualized.' — took 45 seconds with the Email Agent. Total time from request to send: under 20 minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time to produce a complete exec brief (target: under 30 minutes from request to send)

Number of briefs where the headcount or cost figure had to be corrected after sending (target: zero)

Open action items from HR leadership meetings that are more than 14 days old

Percentage of executive asks that have a supporting brief on file (for audit and institutional memory)

Reduction in back-and-forth emails after a brief is sent (proxy for brief quality and completeness)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Docs + manual Paylocity exports

Free and familiar, but every brief is built from a stale CSV snapshot — numbers drift between export and send, and there's no connection to your meeting notes or decision history.

Notion AI

Good for writing and searching within Notion, but it can't reach your Paylocity payroll actuals or pull action items from external meeting transcripts — you're still assembling the data layer yourself.

ChatGPT or Claude with copy-paste

Fast at writing once you give it the numbers, but you're still doing all the data gathering manually, and there's no connection to your live HR systems or meeting history.

BambooHR or Rippling built-in reporting

Good for headcount and org data within those systems, but they can't cross-reference payroll actuals from Paylocity, pull context from your meeting notes, or draft the brief itself — they stop at the data export step.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, meeting notes, email agent 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

Our payroll runs through Paylocity. Does Starch actually connect to it, or do I still have to export a CSV?

Starch syncs your Paylocity data directly on a schedule — employees, org units, pay statements, and payroll runs are pulled automatically and stored in Starch. When you ask for a headcount number or a cost figure, the agent reads from that sync, not from a CSV you exported last week.

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

Yes. BambooHR is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your brief needs headcount or org data. It's not a scheduled sync like Paylocity, so the data is pulled fresh each time you run a brief rather than stored in Starch. For most brief-writing use cases that's fine; if you need historical headcount trend data archived over time, that's worth noting as a current limit.

What about ADP? We switched from Paylocity last year.

ADP is also a scheduled-sync provider in Starch — workers, org units, and pay statements sync on a schedule just like Paylocity. The setup is the same; you'd connect ADP instead.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're cautious about connecting payroll data to external tools.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified — that's an honest limit worth knowing before you connect payroll data. If your org's security policy requires SOC 2 Type II for any system that touches payroll, Starch isn't there yet. Worth asking your IT or legal team what threshold applies.

We don't have a 'recurring HR leadership sync' — it's more ad hoc. Does Meeting Notes still help?

Yes. Meeting Notes works for any call you add it to, not just scheduled recurring ones. If you have a one-off call with the CFO or a quick headcount check-in with the CEO, you can add the Starch bot to that specific meeting and get the same transcript, summary, and action-item extraction. The brief-drafting agent can then pull from those notes the same way.

Can Starch write the brief entirely on its own, or do I still have to edit it?

Starch drafts it — structure, data citations, recommendation language — but you should review before it goes to an exec. The data it pulls from Paylocity or ADP is accurate to the last sync, but the judgment call about how to frame a sensitive headcount decision is still yours. Think of it as getting to the 80% draft in 10 minutes instead of spending an hour getting to 60%.

What if the exec wants a slide deck instead of a written brief?

Presentation Agent — which builds polished slide decks from a text description — is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the written brief from Starch gives you all the content organized; moving it into slides manually is faster when the structure and numbers are already done.