Headcount Planner App Overview

Headcount Planner

1. What it is

Headcount Planner lets managers and HR leaders build workforce plans — how many people to hire, in which departments, at what budget — and track those plans through to filled positions. It connects directly to Job Board: Create Job Posting turns an approved position into a draft Job Board posting with one click, with its title, salary range, and skills carried over — and from there the position follows the hire on its own.

• Enablement: Headcount Planner requires a license. An admin enables it from Admin → Apps → All Apps and configures it in the app’s Admin → General Settings tab.
• What it is not: Headcount Planner is for planning and budgeting headcount. It does not manage the recruiting pipeline itself — candidates, interviews, and offers live in Job Board, Interview Scheduler, and Offer Manager.

2. Standing it up

1. Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps and enable Headcount Planner.
2. Open the app and go to the Admin tab. Turn on the features your organization needs: AI Forecasting, Market Intelligence and Executive Reporting under General Settings; the OKR Hub, Recruiting Apps and EPMS pages under Integration Settings; the Headcount Agent under AI Configuration. These all start off — see 5. Settings for the two switches that start on.
3. Create your first plan: go to the Planning tab → Plans → Create Plan. Give it a name, choose the type (Annual, Quarterly, Project, Strategic, or Custom), and set the date range.
4. Add at least one scenario to the plan (e.g. Baseline). Inside the scenario, create department budgets — each budget defines the headcount, salary range, and priority for one department and role category.
5. Inside each budget, add positions — each with a title, justification, salary band, and target dates.
6. Grant access: the app is visible to managers and above, plus anyone designated as a Headcount Planner app admin. No separate role assignment is needed beyond the organization’s existing manager hierarchy.
7. Confirm it worked: Managers should see the Headcount Planner Dashboard with active plans, key metrics, and upcoming milestones. The Headcount Grid shows a live view of employees and planned positions.

Silent-until-paired: A plan does nothing visible until it has at least one scenario with a budget and a position inside it. The Dashboard metrics, Grid, and Analytics all derive from positions — an empty plan shows zeros everywhere.

3. How it fits together

Plan → Scenario → Budget → Position

This is the core nesting that governs the entire app.

A plan covers a set period — typically a year or a quarter. It moves through four statuses: Draft → Active → Completed → Archived. Only a draft plan can be edited; only an active plan is visible on the dashboard and tracked by milestones. A completed or archived plan is read-only: positions on it can no longer be added, edited or decided. Actions → Archive plan closes a plan on purpose, and activating a plan archives any other active plan. Validate marks a plan as reviewed so it can be activated; it does not check the plan’s figures.

Each plan holds one or more scenarios — named what-if versions such as Baseline, Conservative Growth, Optimistic Growth, or Aggressive Expansion. Each scenario carries its own revenue growth assumption, budget constraint factor, and hiring velocity assumption. You can compare scenarios side by side, then mark one as the selected scenario — the one the plan’s headline metrics reflect.

Example: a 2026 Annual Workforce Plan might have three scenarios:

Scenario	Revenue growth	Hiring velocity	Total budget
Conservative Growth	5%	3 hires/month	$1.2M
Baseline	10%	4 hires/month	$1.8M
Aggressive Expansion	40%	10 hires/month	$4.5M

The team compares all three, then selects Baseline as the plan of record.

Inside each scenario, budgets break the plan down by department. A budget defines the planned headcount, salary range, per-position budget, recruiting and onboarding cost estimates, and target dates for one department-and-role combination. The total budget is computed automatically: (positions × per-position budget) + (recruiting + onboarding costs × positions).

Inside each budget, positions are the individual seats to hire for. Each position has a title, justification type (New Role, Backfill, Expansion, or Replacement), salary band, seniority level (Junior through Executive), priority (Low, Medium, High, or Critical), hiring manager, and target dates. Every position gets an auto-generated position ID in the format DEPT-ROLE-YEAR-###.

Hiring status and the Job Board handoff

Each position moves through a hiring pipeline:

Planned → Approved → Requisition Created → In Progress → Filled

The key transition is Approved → Requisition Created. When a manager clicks Create Job Posting on an approved position, the app creates a draft Job Board posting with the position’s title, salary range, skills, employment type, and hiring manager already filled in; a Job Board admin or the posting’s recruiter publishes it. Create Job Posting is hidden until Job Board is turned on for your business. From that point the position follows the posting on its own: it moves to In Progress when the first applicant arrives, and to Filled — recording who filled it and when — the moment the accepted candidate becomes an employee. Those automatic steps appear in the position’s timeline as performed by System. Start Hiring and Mark Filled remain available for hires made outside Job Board.

An approved position’s title, seniority, employment type and compensation are what was approved. Changing any of them returns the position to Planned and notifies the approver and the position’s stakeholders with what changed; dates, description, skills and managers can be edited freely. The edit form says so before you save. Once a position has a Job Board posting — or is filled, rejected or cancelled — those signed-off fields can no longer change at all; duplicate the position to ask for different terms.

A position awaiting approval can be Rejected, and a reason is required. The position page then shows who declined it, when and why, with Ask again (as a new request) to send a copy for approval. While a position still awaits approval, the person who asked for it can Withdraw request, which cancels it. A position can be Cancelled at any stage before filling from the Headcount Grid.

Milestones

Each plan automatically tracks milestones — dated checkpoints such as budget approval, quarterly reviews, and completion targets. Milestones can depend on each other and flag themselves as critical-path items. A milestone that is blocked by an unfinished dependency cannot be started until the dependency completes.

The system runs a daily sweep that notifies milestone owners about:

• Overdue milestones — the owner is notified up to once per week while the milestone remains overdue, stopping after 90 days past due.
• Milestones due within 14 days — the owner gets a heads-up notification.
• Over-budget budgets — the plan creator is notified when a department budget in the selected scenario runs more than 5% over its plan.
• At-risk plans — the plan creator is notified when an active plan is off track (milestone completion lags the timeline by more than 10 percentage points, past 25% of the timeline).

Notifications go to the in-app bell (and push where opted in) plus a preference-gated email. Sample/demo data never triggers notifications. An admin can turn the whole daily sweep off with Send deadline alerts and approval reminders (Admin → General Settings; it starts on).

Who can access what

Headcount Planner is a management surface — it exposes compensation budgets and salary bands. Access requires Manager or above, or designation as a Headcount Planner app admin.

Within the app:

• By default, everyone who can open the app can create and edit plans, scenarios, budgets and positions, publish a budget, and approve or reject positions; rebalancing a whole scenario’s budgets and editing salary benchmarks are for app admins. Admins change each of these under Admin → General Settings → Permissions; business admins and app admins always can.
• Admins and Super Admins (plus app admins) can manage AI model configuration.
• The Admin tab — General Settings, Integration Settings, Data Management, AI Configuration — is restricted to admins and app admins.
• Department-level access: a manager can raise, edit, approve, reject or delete positions only in a department they are the named manager of, or their own department. Admins and app admins can work in any department.

4. Running it

Starting from a sample plan

Go to Planning → Sample Plans, open a sample plan and click Convert to Plan. Sample plans can be tagged by industry (Technology, Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Retail, Government, Nonprofit or Education). Converting creates a draft plan of your own with a scenario and its department budgets, which you can then customize.

Comparing scenarios

Open a plan, go to Scenarios, and click Compare. The comparison view shows each scenario’s total planned hires, total budget, ROI projection, and hiring velocity assumption side by side.

Approving positions and starting hiring

1. Open a position and click Approve to move it from Planned to Approved (or Reject, with a reason). Positions awaiting approval also appear on the Manager Approvals dashboard (Home → Manager Approvals) beside leave and timesheets, each showing how many of the department’s planned seats are already taken; approving there is the same as approving in the app.
2. Click Create Job Posting to create a draft Job Board posting from the position. The button is hidden until Job Board is turned on for your business.
3. From there the position follows the hire: In Progress when the first applicant arrives, Filled when the accepted candidate becomes an employee. For a hire made outside Job Board, click Start Hiring and then Mark Filled and select the employee.

Using the Headcount Grid

Go to Planning → Headcount Grid. The grid is a live spreadsheet-style view of employees and planned positions across departments, showing current headcount alongside planned positions, positions in hiring, and filled positions.

Reviewing analytics

Go to the Analytics tab → Analytics Dashboard. The dashboard shows planned vs. actual hires, budget utilization, hiring velocity, time-to-fill, and cost-per-hire trends over time. A daily snapshot job records monthly analytics so AI forecasting has real hiring history to draw from.

Standard Reports provides pre-built reports. If Executive Reporting is turned on, managers can also access the Executive Reports section for C-level summary reports.

Exporting data

Plans, budgets, the headcount grid, and positions can be exported. When Require identity verification before exporting salary & budget data is on — the default for tenants set up after 8 September 2026 — users must re-verify their identity (step-up) before the export streams.

Mobile access

Managers can view the dashboard, active plans, upcoming deadlines, and approve or reject positions (with a reason) from mobile. Phone browsers are automatically redirected to the mobile view; tablets stay on the desktop view. Use ?desktop=1 to opt out of the redirect.

5. Settings

All settings live in the app’s Admin tab. Each switch is a tenant-wide gate — it applies to all users regardless of role.

Setting	Where	Default	What it changes
Enable Headcount Agent	Admin → AI Configuration	Off	Lets managers and HR ask the Headcount Agent about plans, budgets and positions in Ask AI, and request a new position (they confirm first)
AI Forecasting	Admin → General Settings	Off	AI demand forecasts, scenario recommendations, budget optimization suggestions, skills-gap analysis, the AI Models library, and the AI Strategic Insights card on the dashboard
Market Intelligence	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the Market Intelligence page: the salary benchmark library your team enters or imports, and AI market analysis for a role or region
Executive Reporting	Admin → General Settings	Off	Shows the Executive Summary on the Analytics dashboard and the Executive Reports pages
Send deadline alerts and approval reminders	Admin → General Settings	On	The daily check that tells a plan’s owner about overdue or due-soon milestones, over-budget departments and off-track plans, and reminds approvers once a week about positions still waiting for their decision. The first request to decide a position, and decisions on positions and plans, are always sent
Require identity verification before exporting salary & budget data	Admin → General Settings	On for tenants set up after 8 September 2026; Off for earlier tenants	Adds a step-up verification prompt before plan, budget, grid and position exports
Permissions (five “Who can…?” controls)	Admin → General Settings	Everyone with access, except rebalancing and salary benchmarks (app admins)	Who may create and edit plans, publish a budget, approve or reject positions, rebalance a scenario’s budgets, and edit salary benchmarks
OKR Hub Integration	Admin → Integration Settings	Off	Shows the OKR Hub page and its nav item (OKR Hub must be turned on too). No goals are read from OKR Hub yet, so the page is empty
Recruiting Apps Integration	Admin → Integration Settings	Off	Shows the Recruiting Apps page and its nav item, with your plans’ open positions. No candidate pipeline is read yet. Create Job Posting, Start Hiring and Mark Filled work whether it is on or off
EPMS Integration	Admin → Integration Settings	Off	Shows the Performance skills page and the Skills Analysis nav item (Performance Management must be turned on too). No skills data is read yet, so those screens show a dash or an empty list, not a measured figure

6. More help

• Headcount Planner FAQ — specific setup, operating, and troubleshooting questions
• Ask AI — the Headcount Agent answers plain-language questions about plans, budgets, and positions awaiting a decision when enabled