A finance team that doesn't settle for "good enough" forecast accuracy

Many finance teams consider a 3–5% variance to forecast a strong result. Jeff Bolan, Director of Strategic Finance at Affirm, holds his team to a higher bar. "We aim for within 1% accuracy on both opex and headcount," he says. "Payroll is our largest expense. A 4% variance would be unacceptable."

That standard didn't materialize overnight. Affirm went public in 2021 in the middle of a hiring surge, then went through a significant layoff, and now manages headcount with intense discipline. Each phase demanded more rigor than the last. When Jeff arrived, the ownership of the forecast was split across teams and planning lived in shared spreadsheets with no granularity on location, comp bands, or equity. Finance, People, and the business each maintained their own version of the truth. "It really was a process maturity and a system maturity problem," Jeff says.

Caro keeps up with a constantly changing headcount plan

Jeff brought in Caro as the headcount planning layer that feeds into Anaplan, a system where plans are approved and tracked, with integrations into Workday and Greenhouse that spreadsheets couldn't support. Caro became the single source of truth for headcount, updated in real time, and was shared with Recruiting and HR counterparts.

The real proof came during dynamic planning cycles when iterations to the headcount plan are made sometimes daily. Before Caro, the team would constantly reconcile headcount with hires. Without an understanding of what recruiting was doing, finance could modify roles that were already in flight, creating a plan that wasn't actually feasible. Emerson Croxton, Director of Talent Acquisition, saw the same problem from the other side: "We didn't know if a role was approved, planned, or a backfill. We didn't have a structured way of communicating that."

In a spreadsheet world, headcount can quickly become political when every leader argues their roles are the most critical. Jeff's team tagged initiatives in Caro to map new positions to strategic priorities and stack-rank them. "In a headcount-constrained environment, you need to see which positions map to which priorities to make sound decisions." Jeff's team turned a fraught conversation into a data-driven prioritization exercise.

An accurate forecast means leaders can react faster

Affirm now runs continuous 6-quarter rolling forecasts, and the accuracy holds. Jeff's team consistently hits less than 1% variance to plan. "Now we don't even need contingency buffers because our accuracy is really spot on," Jeff says. That precision has a direct consequence: senior leadership trusts the numbers enough to make decisions with confidence.

The confidence also gives leadership room to course-correct. When Jeff's team spots a plan drifting, they have the data to act early rather than scramble at quarter-end. And downstream teams feel it too: Emerson can now trace why every position exists and advise leaders on their headcount decisions. "Our ability to point to the exact roles that can be repurposed lets the leader make trade-offs with better information."

Jeff is now pushing the team beyond pure financial planning into workforce planning, evaluating not just whether a hire fits the budget, but whether it builds an effective team. "The workforce structure needs to have effective teams, not just budget-compliant teams," he says.