Why We Built HeadcountHQ

Every product has an origin story. Ours started with a spreadsheet that crashed at the worst possible moment.

The Spreadsheet That Broke

I was VP of Finance at a 200-person startup. We were in the middle of board prep, trying to reconcile our hiring plan against actual headcount. The spreadsheet - lovingly maintained by our finance team for 18 months - was 47 tabs deep.

Someone had accidentally overwritten a formula. Two weeks of data was wrong. We had to reconstruct everything from email threads, Slack messages, and meeting notes.

We missed the board deadline. More importantly, we realized we had no idea if we were actually hiring according to plan.

The Real Problem

After that incident, I started talking to finance and HR leaders at other companies. Everyone had their own version of the same story:

• Approval requests lost in email inboxes
• Version control chaos with competing spreadsheets
• No visibility into where approvals were stuck
• Days or weeks to answer simple questions like "are we on plan?"

The pattern was clear: headcount planning is critical, but the tools are broken.

Why Existing Solutions Don't Work

I looked at what was available:

Enterprise HRIS Systems

Great at tracking who you've already hired. Terrible at planning who you should hire. Most treat headcount planning as an afterthought - a module bolted onto the main product.

Spreadsheets

Flexible and familiar, but they break at scale. No workflow, no approvals, no real-time visibility. Version control is impossible.

Project Management Tools

Some teams try to use Asana or Monday for approvals. But these tools weren't built for financial workflows. They can't track budgets, can't connect to your HRIS, and don't understand headcount-specific logic.

What We Believed

We started HeadcountHQ based on a few core beliefs:

1. Headcount Planning Deserves Its Own Category

You don't use your email client for accounting. You don't use spreadsheets for CRM. Headcount planning is important enough to deserve purpose-built tools.

2. Finance and HR Should See the Same Data

Most headcount problems come from information asymmetry. When both teams operate from a shared source of truth, conflict disappears.

3. Approvals Should Be Fast, Not Slow

Approval workflows exist to enable good decisions, not prevent bad ones. When you have the right information and the right process, approvals should take hours, not weeks.

4. Great Candidates Shouldn't Be Lost to Slow Processes

In a competitive hiring market, speed matters. Every day you delay is a day your competitor can move faster.

What We Built

HeadcountHQ is what we wished we had at that 200-person startup:

• Single source of truth: One place for headcount planning, approvals, and tracking
• Smart workflows: Approvals route automatically to the right people based on your rules
• Real-time visibility: Everyone can see where requests are and what's approved
• Budget tracking: Connect approvals to budget so you know if you're on plan
• Actual vs. plan: Reconcile your hiring plan against reality automatically

Who It's For

We built HeadcountHQ for growing companies - typically 50-500 employees - where:

• Spreadsheets are breaking
• Hiring is happening across multiple teams
• Finance and HR need to stay aligned
• Speed matters but control is still important

If you're a 10-person startup, spreadsheets are fine. If you're a 5,000-person enterprise, you probably have custom internal tools. We're focused on that middle ground where companies are growing fast and need systems that scale.

What's Different

We're not trying to be your HRIS, your ATS, or your finance system. We integrate with those tools but we're laser-focused on one workflow: requisition to offer approval. We believe focused tools, done well, beat all-in-one platforms that do everything poorly.

What We're Learning

Since launching, we've learned a few things:

• Every company's approval workflow is unique: That's why flexibility matters more than templates
• Visibility drives behavior: When approval times are visible, approvers move faster
• Integration is critical: HeadcountHQ needs to fit into your existing stack, not replace it
• Simple beats complex: Features that require training don't get used

What's Next

We're just getting started. On our roadmap:

• Deeper HRIS integrations for automatic backfill triggers
• Compensation benchmarking to inform approval decisions
• Advanced analytics on hiring velocity and bottlenecks
• Budget forecasting based on hiring pipeline

Why Now?

The shift to remote work made headcount planning harder. When everyone was in the office, you could walk down the hall to get approval. Now you need systems that work asynchronously across time zones.

At the same time, economic uncertainty made budget discipline critical. Companies can't afford to overhire or waste time on slow processes. HeadcountHQ exists because the way we work has changed, and our tools need to catch up.

Join Us

If this resonates with you, we'd love to have you try HeadcountHQ. Start with a 14-day free trial.

And if you have ideas, feedback, or just want to share your own headcount horror stories, reach out. We're building this for you, and your input shapes what we build next.