Headcount Planning & Collaboration

The problem

For most companies, people are the single biggest cost — and the hiring plan lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. Finance keeps one version, hiring managers keep another, and neither connects to the P&L: approve three hires and no one can say what happens to runway. Every planning cycle turns into archaeology — whose tab is current, what changed, who approved it.

What we built

• Hires modeled on live P&L — every planned role carries its fully-loaded cost into the P&L and cash-flow forecast the moment it's added, so “can we afford this?” is answered by the plan itself.
• Finance and hiring managers in one plan — real-time sharing and commenting where the plan lives, not in email threads about an attachment.
• Change tracking — who added, moved or re-leveled which role, when. The audit trail that spreadsheets lose is the system of record here.

The shape of it

A sketch of the core view — a hiring plan where every row is a line in the forecast (roles and figures illustrative):

What finance software taught me

Finance software is unforgiving in a way that shaped how I build everything since: numbers must reconcile, every user is an expert, and “roughly right” is wrong. Two years of it sharpened my respect for deterministic systems — and for knowing when not to reach for ML. That judgment turned out to be one of the most useful AI-product skills I have.

Scope, honestly

The table above is a sketch, not a screenshot — real customer plans are confidential, so the roles and figures are invented. What it depicts — hires as live P&L lines, collaboration and change tracking in the plan itself — is exactly what shipped.