Your Hiring Plan Doesn't Match Your Cash Plan

A founder I work with runs a 38-person SaaS business. Her 2026 plan called for 12 new hires and $4.8M in total comp. By March, five were in seats. Hiring was on schedule.

In April, her bookkeeper flagged that comp expense was running $94K above plan against a $1.2M quarterly budget. Nobody had moved a number. Nothing was wrong with the hires.

Three of the five had come in 11-15% above the target salary because the market moved. Two had earlier start dates than budgeted. Benefits costs rebased after January's open enrollment. Small variances. Her plan didn't catch them because the hiring plan and the cash plan lived in different files.

Where the gap shows up

Most growing companies build the hiring plan somewhere HR or the founder can see it. Roles, target start dates, target salaries. Often a Notion doc or a Google Sheet.

The cash plan lives elsewhere. A finance-owned model. Comp expense rolls up by department, not by role.

When a hire comes in $14K above plan, nobody updates the cash plan. The hiring doc is the source of truth for the people side. The cash model is the source of truth for the finance side. Neither reflects the other in real time.

By Q2, the comp delta is typically 4-7% of plan. By Q4, it compounds into a $200K-$400K gap on a $4-5M payroll.

The variance isn't in any single hire. It's in the gap between the document that says "we'll hire her" and the document that says "we have the cash to do that."

What to reconcile

For a 30-50 person company, the reconciliation takes about three hours and saves the work of explaining the variance later.

Pull every approved role with a target start date. Pull the cash model's monthly comp expense by department. For each role, capture: confirmed start date, signed offer salary (not target), employer-side benefits and payroll tax load at 22-28% of base, equity refresh assumptions where applicable.

Sum it. Compare it to the cash model. The delta is your real exposure.

For most growing companies, this exercise surfaces three findings. Some hires are paid more than plan because the offer beat the target. Some arrive earlier than budgeted. Some roles still in the plan have been quietly delayed or canceled and nobody told finance.

A monthly reconciliation catches each one. Without it, they accumulate.

Why it matters now

April is when Q1 actuals make this gap legible for the first time. The variance is small enough to ignore and large enough to compound. Most founders see it again in October, when the catch-up is uglier.

A hiring plan that lives in a different file from your cash plan is two plans, not one. They diverge by default.

Run the reconciliation monthly. It takes less time than explaining the variance to your board.