Arthi Chordias Top 5 Headcount Planning Reports

Headcount is your largest investment, and your hardest number to keep straight. Stop reconciling headcount in spreadsheets. These five reports give Finance and People teams one source of truth to plan, defend, and pace every hire.

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Ask three teams for the headcount number and you get three answers. None of them are wrong.

Finance is looking at budgeted headcount. HR is looking at active headcount. TA is looking at open reqs. Same question, three systems, three answers, and a quarter-end meeting that turns into a reconciliation exercise instead of a decision.

These five reports were built with Arthi Chordia, founder of In2tive Insights, who led FP&A at DocuSign and Eventbrite. Her point is that the reconciled number was never the deliverable. No one in an executive meeting wants to sit and reconcile numbers. They want the so what.

So each report starts from a question a leader actually asks, and answers it with the cost already attached.

The five reports

Headcount walk

Every move in and out of the org, from prior periods through today to projected final state. You see where teams are scaling and where growth stalled before the budget conversation starts.

Hiring plan variance

Every role delayed, pulled forward, or re-leveled, with the prorated and annualized impact of each. Days slipped times daily fully loaded cost tells you what the calendar cost you.

Rolling YTD attrition

Trailing 12-month and fiscal-year-to-date rates by division. Attrition sets your real hiring demand, backfills included, and shows where recruiter coverage has to go by geography.

Hiring composition

FY hires split into backfill and net new. It answers whether a team is growing or replacing, which is the difference between capacity expansion and attrition on a board slide.

Recruiter throughput

Workload, pipeline health, and closure velocity across every assigned role. Stalled searches surface before they turn into a missed plan.

Watch the conversation behind the reports

Three Teams, One Plan: Aligning Finance, HR, and Talent on Headcount

Tushar Makhija, Founder of TeamOhana, and Arthi Chordia walk through the process these reports run on. They cover the 30-minute weekly reconciliation between Finance, HR, and TA, and the three things Arthi says make a rollout stick.

She also makes the case most finance teams get backwards. A delayed AE hire is not a cost saving. It is a revenue risk, because ramp time and capacity modeling go with it.

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