Owning Pre-Workday Hiring Decisions
Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Capital, on the biggest opportunities in fintech today
The real opening is not replacing Workday as a system of record, it is owning the messy decisions that happen before anything ever gets entered there. Workday stores approved jobs and employees, but finance still has to decide who gets hired, when they start, what level they come in at, what that does to cash burn, and how those choices ripple into sales capacity and operating plans. That is why teams still fall back to spreadsheets and why FP&A tools are trying to become the place where headcount decisions actually get made.
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Enterprise planning tools are good at structured budgeting workflows, approvals, and org hierarchies, but even large companies often keep using spreadsheets or flexible modeling tools for the parts that need custom logic. The planning system becomes the place numbers are submitted, not the place the thinking happens.
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Modern FP&A products are building directly around this gap. Runway turns departmental edits into draft scenarios that finance can review, while Pry built page level sharing so a sales or product leader can update only their budget inputs without breaking the model. The product is really workflow software wrapped around a planning model.
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This is becoming a distinct expansion path inside FP&A. Vena is pushing beyond core finance into headcount and operational planning, and Causal notes that some companies even adopt dedicated headcount planning tools like ChartHop alongside broader planning systems. Hiring planning is big enough to support its own product surface.
The next phase is connecting hiring plans to the rest of the operating model in real time. The winning products will not just show an open req list, they will connect each planned hire to payroll data, sales targets, project roadmaps, and actual outcomes, so finance can see which hires created growth and which plans slipped. That turns headcount planning from annual paperwork into an always on control system for the business.