How we fix headcount planning
Better plans.
Cleaner decisions.
Stronger control.
We work with Finance, HR and Business leaders to redesign the way people, cost and capacity are forecast, approved and governed.
People are the largest number on your P&L. They get the least disciplined plan.
Yet the headcount plan is typically the line item built on the shakiest foundation: a contested baseline, padded requests, costs nobody can see in full, and approvals that happen off to the side.
Planning headcount hurts, and the data says it's structural.
The same symptoms show up in almost every organisation above a few hundred people.
Weeks lost just agreeing what today's actual headcount even is
Plans quietly padded with placeholder roles nobody has to justify
The full, annualised cost of a hire only becomes clear after it's made
Budgeted roles re-approved months later in a separate, off-system process
Reporting lines and the approval matrix tell two different stories
Versions, spreadsheets and email threads, with no single source of truth
The plan drifts from reality the moment the cycle ends
Finance spends the cycle reconciling, not advising
We start with how decisions move, not with software.
Headcount planning breaks down when each part of the process is treated in isolation: the baseline sits with one team, demand is captured somewhere else, cost logic is buried in spreadsheets, approvals happen off-system, and reconciliation becomes a manual exercise after the decisions are made.
We look at the full lifecycle as one connected system, then redesign the operating model so Finance, HR, Talent and business leaders share clear roles, one dataset, and a single view of what has been planned, approved and hired. The result is an end-to-end capability, not another planning document.
A focused diagnostic that shows where time, cost and trust are being lost across your headcount planning process. In two to three weeks we assess maturity across key dimensions, identify the failure modes present and provide a prioritised roadmap for improvement.
- ✓Maturity scorecard across eight dimensions
- ✓The failure modes present, and their cost
- ✓A prioritised, costed roadmap
- ✓An executive readout for your team
Each has a fixed scope, a fixed fee and a clear deliverable. Hover any tile for detail.
A focused diagnostic that shows where time, cost and trust are being lost across your headcount planning process. In two to three weeks, we assess maturity across key dimensions, identify the failure modes present and provide a prioritised roadmap for improvement.
We design the target process, ownership model, RACI, governance rhythm and cost logic needed to make headcount planning work end to end: a practical operating model clarifying who owns what, how decisions are made and how the process stays live between cycles.
We help you decide whether to configure what you already own or select a better-fit tool. Our output is a build-ready blueprint translating business requirements into cost logic, workflows, data-model needs and system design principles.
We support the redesign and implementation of the full planning and approval lifecycle, from baseline and demand planning through to approval, hiring and reconciliation, bringing process, people and system into one controlled capability.
We stay close through the first live cycle to help the new process land: practical support for your Finance, HR and business teams, issue resolution and an improvement backlog as the capability becomes business-as-usual.
Plan your people like you plan your revenue.
A Headcount Healthcheck shows you exactly where time, cost and trust drain out of your headcount planning, and the roadmap to fix it. The two-minute diagnostic report is where it starts.