The FP&A gap that’s killing your headcount efficiency

If you’ve been a part of any board meeting in the last couple of years, you know the question on everyone’s mind is, “Are we allocating capital in a way that gives us a shot at winning?” And whether you’re the CEO, CFO, or head of a department, in order to answer capital allocation questions, you have to start with your biggest line item, your headcount.

With payroll commonly adding up to 70% of a company’s OpEx, it makes sense that investors and business leaders are scrutinizing every dollar spent on headcount. Each new hire is a high-stakes investment that directly impacts your success or failure.

But the worst part is, it’s nearly impossible to answer these questions or build a case for a new hire that you really do need if you’re suffering from the FP&A gap.

At TeamOhana, we believe the companies that will win big in the next ten years will be the ones that manage headcount with the level of precision and care that great investors apply to managing their portfolios. The winners will be the teams that fill the FP&A gap, so they can allocate capital with confidence and conviction.

What is the FP&A gap?

The FP&A gap is the breakdown between strategy and execution in workforce planning and manageemnt. It’s the no-man’s-land between Finance, HR, Recruiting, and Hiring Managers where critical workforce data lives in disconnected systems, updates at different cadences, and rarely tells the same story. 

When this gap exists, nobody has the full picture. Finance sees budgets, HR sees employee records, Talent sees candidates, and Managers see their own team’s needs, but collaboration is nearly impossible. 

The result? Slow decisions, bad bets, and a dangerous disconnect between your strategic headcount plan and what’s actually happening on the ground.

An example: What the FP&A gap looks like in practice

The reality is that most companies that suffer from the FP&A gap have a solid tech stack to manage the data. They have some combination of FP&A, ERP, HRIS, and ATS systems like Workday, Anaplan, UKG, Greenhouse, and BambooHR. 

The problem is that none of these systems talk to each other. So, when Finance, HR, and Talent come together for workforce management, nobody is on the same page. 

What winds up happening is Finance reviews the budget vs. actuals in the FP&A platform. HR pulls reports from the HRIS. Recruiting checks the ATS and someone tries to stitch it all together in Excel. You can be pretty certain you’re suffering from the FP&A gap if you are using FP&A software, but you’re still using spreadsheets to make workforce decisions or collaborate with other teams.

The consequences of bridging the gap with spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are the default tool for Finance, or as our TeamOhana Co-Founder and CEO, Tushar Makhija, said in a recent interview, “they’re like peanut butter for CFO’s” because they’re familiar and comfortable. And I’m certainly not one to judge. As a data-minded marketing leader, I often default to spreadsheets for reporting, A/B test analysis, and board meeting prep.

But at scale, spreadsheets break. They’re brittle, they aren’t collaborative, and the moment you update one, another version is already circulating. You can’t afford to manage your most important asset, your people, in a spreadsheet. 

When workforce planning stakeholders resort to spreadsheets, they wind up spending more time reconciling data than analyzing it. The result is misalignment, frustration, and wasted effort across the company because, underneath it all, the plan itself often has no strategic backbone. 

One team asks for ten heads because that’s what they had last year. Another inflates their request in an offensive maneuver to wind up with the headcount they actually want. But no one’s really thinking in terms of ROI, just volume.

That’s the real cost of the FP&A gap.

Not just inefficiency, but decisions made without the context, clarity, or the conviction a company needs to grow responsibly.

What if you managed headcount like an investment portfolio instead?

Every role—open, filled, or frozen—has a cost, a timeline, and an expected return. It's an investment portfolio. And just like any portfolio, you need visibility to make smart bets.

You need one connected view that brings Finance, HR, and Talent together and helps everyone speak the same language. Not 4+ different systems, each with its own source of truth, but rather one live picture of your workforce.

TeamOhana was purpose-built for this—to help teams manage their greatest investment, their people, with the same care and rigor any good investor applies to managing their portfolio.

Want to see the impact of delaying a few Q4 hires by 30 or 90 days? TeamOhana will show you the dollar amount you’ll save in as many scenarios as you want to run in a matter of seconds. You don’t have to guess or cobble together Excel hacks.

In TeamOhana, you can easily:

• See the current status of every role (approved, pending, delayed)
• Model changes in real time
• Shift spend where it’ll make the biggest impact (with confidence)

But this isn’t just about Finance building smarter models. It’s about bringing the entire org into the same conversation. You need to be able to look at the number of heads and financial numbers in different currencies in one platform. Because Finance, People, Talent, Recruiters, and Hiring Managers all need to be able to speak the same language.

This is the new frontier: Collaborative workforce intelligence that allows you to manage headcount ROI like the key investment it is.

How TeamOhana fills the FP&A gap and gives you a mission control center for workforce management

TeamOhana is the system of action, the mission control center, that connects your current tech stack. You still need your systems of record, your Workday, Anaplan, Greenhouse, etc.

TeamOhana is the connective tissue that stitches all of the data in those systems you’re already using together, turning scattered data into a live, collaborative decision-making infrastructure.

It’s not just dashboards or reports. It’s a set of AI-supported workflows that close the loop between planning and execution. Here’s what that looks like in action:

Everyone works off of the same plan and sees the same data. Teams make smarter, faster decisions together, and face fewer surprises down the road. Because when your most important investment is people, you can’t afford for your systems (or your teams) to operate in silos.

Join us, you’ll be in good company

At TeamOhana, we’ve been fortunate to partner with some of the most forward-thinking companies in the world—organizations that understand headcount isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, but their single most important investment. From high-growth startups to established industry leaders, our customers share one thing in common: a relentless drive to plan smarter, move faster, and bring their teams into perfect alignment.

Leaders like Kenny Tran, Head of Business Transformation at Scale AI, trust TeamOhana to help them continually raise the bar for what’s possible. In Kenny’s words, “One of our credos is run through walls, so we are pushing the boundaries, and to find a partner like TeamOhana allows us to partner and push those boundaries.” 

Joe Becic, Finance Director at Docker, told us, “Not only is TeamOhana the source of truth for headcount and hiring plans, it's really helped us scale a prescriptive, collaborative process with the business.”

We’ve seen our customers slash manual planning work by 75%, cut variance to under 3%, and make hiring decisions in hours instead of weeks. But beyond the numbers, they’re building stronger cross-functional relationships between Finance, HR, Talent, and Business Leaders, turning what used to be a constant source of friction into a genuine strategic advantage.

These aren’t just customer wins—they’re proof that when you close the FP&A gap and give every stakeholder the same source of truth, magic happens. If you’re ready to join the ranks of companies like Postman, Vercel, Scale AI, and SeatGeek, we’d love to show you what’s possible. Let’s build the future of workforce planning together.