Workforce Planning: Model your next hires and their real cost inside Plane

Every hiring plan starts with the same question: what will these hires cost? Not just salaries, but the fully-loaded number, including employer taxes and statutory benefits. And for most teams, answering it means opening a spreadsheet, performing manual calculations, and hoping the formulas still hold three months from now.

We wanted to close that loop. So we built Workforce Planning, now available in beta for every Plane workspace. It lets you model future headcount and see the total employer cost of each hire, right where your team and payroll data already live. No need to jump between your payroll platform and a separate spreadsheet; Finance and HR both get to see the same headcount plan, right at the source of truth.

Prefer the one-minute version? Our CEO Matt walks through why we built Workforce Planning and what it means for your next hiring cycle.

Plan where your data already is

If you're forecasting headcount today, chances are you're doing it in a spreadsheet that sits far from the system that runs payroll. Someone builds the model, someone else keeps the org data current, and the two drift apart the moment a start date moves or a role gets re-scoped.

Workforce Planning brings the plan into Plane. You build it from positions (i.e., the roles you're considering, each with a location, worker type, start date, and compensation), and Plane forecasts the cost month by month across your planning window. There's no separate file to maintain, no reconciling your plan against the source of truth, because the plan lives inside the source of truth.

You can spin up multiple plans, compare them, and once you've settled on one, approve it to lock in a final snapshot of the numbers you can refer back to. Optionally download a PDF version of the plan, to easily share it with your manager or investors.

See the fully-loaded cost. No onboarding required.

The real cost of a hire includes employer taxes, mandatory contributions like social security, and statutory benefits that vary by country, such as 13th and 14th month salaries in places like Ecuador and Italy.

Workforce Planning estimates the fully-loaded cost for you. For an employee hired internationally through an employer of record (EOR), the forecast includes base compensation, employer taxes and contributions, and statutory benefits where they apply. Contractors are estimated at their compensation. Every position converts from its local currency into USD, so a plan spanning five countries still rolls up into one currency. More currency reporting options besides USD will be available in the future.

And you can see all of it before committing to anything. You don't have to create a role, extend an offer, or bring someone onto the platform just to get a credible estimate. For a head of people sizing up next year's org, and a finance partner pressure-testing the budget behind it, that's the same set of numbers. No translation is needed between your two views of the plan.

Getting started

Workforce Planning is in beta and available for admins. It’s free to try for all Plane plans. Turn it on today in the Features catalog. Once it’s on, you’ll find it under People > Planning. For more information on this feature, see our help article.