The five-minute version
If you only read one thing.
- Setup — enter your cost centre name, your fiscal year start, and your salary budget.
- Complement — add a position for every job on your establishment, filled or not. Pick the classification group, level and step; the rate fills itself in.
- Setup again — put a whole-year number against each of the six estimate lines.
- Forecast — read where the year lands.
On the Setup tab, Load an example cost centre fills in twenty positions against a $1.78M budget. Poke at it, then Erase everything and start with your own. Nothing you do to the example touches anything real.
1 · Set up your cost centre
Setup tab. Takes about a minute.
- Name and number
- Cosmetic. They appear at the top of the Forecast so you know whose year you're looking at.
- Fiscal year starts
- April 1 for most of the public sector. Everything is costed forward from this date.
- Pay periods
- 26 unless you know otherwise. A fiscal year is 26 periods of 14 days, and every salary is divided by this number to get a per-period cost.
- Salary budget
- Your salary envelope for the year — the number you are held to. Not including benefits, and not including operating.
- Watch at / Act at
- How far off budget you'll tolerate before the app changes its tone. Defaults are 5% and 15%. Below "watch" it stays quiet; past "act" it tells you to do something.
2 · Build your complement
Complement tab. About fifteen seconds a position once you have the rhythm.
Add every position on your establishment — filled, vacant, or somewhere in between. A vacancy costs nothing until someone starts, but it has to be in the list or your person-year count is wrong.
- Who's in it?
- A first name or a nickname, so the list reads like your team rather than a spreadsheet. It stays on your device and is excluded by default if you ever export. Leave it blank if you'd rather.
- Classification group, level and step
- Pick the group (EC, PM, AS, FI, CR…), then the level, then the step. The published rate appears underneath with the date it took effect. 107 groups and 3,454 steps are built in.
- Assigned hours
- Full time, or a percentage. If someone changes hours mid-year, tick Hours change during the year and give the date — the app costs each part of the year at the right rate.
- Moves up a step during the year
- Tick it and give the increment date. Everything before that date is costed at the old step, everything after at the new one. Not averaged.
- Status this year
- Filled all year · Vacant with an expected start date · Leaving on a date · Unpaid leave with a gap. Between them these four cover almost everything; anything else is a combination.
A start date in the middle of a pay period is prorated by the day. That's the difference between a forecast you can defend in a meeting and one that's roughly right.
EX, DM, GC, GCQ, CEO, LC and PM-MCO are salary ranges, not step grids. The app shows the minimum and maximum; pick the figure you actually pay. At-risk performance pay is not forecast — put it in the estimates if it lands on your budget.
3 · Add your estimates
Setup tab, below your cost centre details.
Base salary is costed exactly. Everything else on top of base pay is a judgement call, and the app asks you for six whole-year numbers rather than pretending to calculate them:
- Overtime — coverage, peaks, anything worked beyond standard hours.
- Salary premiums — shift, weekend, standby, call-back.
- Acting pay — the differential when someone acts in a higher position.
- Bilingual bonus — on bilingual-imperative positions.
- Retention allowance — terminable and retention allowances.
- Other salary costs — severance, payouts, retroactive pay, the rest.
Enter the whole year, not a month. If you genuinely don't know, last year's actual is a better guess than zero — and zero is a forecast too, just a wrong one.
Precision should follow materiality. Base salary is around 90% of the envelope and can be computed exactly, so it is. The rest is judgement, and dressing a guess up in a formula would make it look more certain than it is.
4 · Read the forecast
Forecast tab. This is the screen you'll actually live on.
The headline
One number: what's left over, or what you're over by. Green is surplus, rust is pressure. Underneath it, the same number as a percentage of your budget — which is the figure Finance will ask for.
The bar
Your budget, filled in. Teal is base salary, amber is your estimates, and the pale remainder is unspent. If the plan goes over, the amber turns red and runs past the end.
The advice
The app reads your variance and how far into the year you are, then says something specific. A 5% surplus in May is an opportunity; the same surplus in February is a problem you should have caught. Copy a note for Finance puts a short summary on your clipboard.
The plan
The whole equation, line by line: budget, less base salary, less each estimate, and what's left. Beside it, how many person-years you're carrying against how many you're funded for.
5 · Test a change
What if tab. This is the part worth learning.
Stack up changes you're considering and see where the year lands if they all happen — without touching your real complement:
- Move a start date — what if that competition takes another two months?
- Leave a job unfilled — what does not staffing it actually save?
- Plan a departure — someone retiring in November.
- Change someone's hours — a request to go to 80%.
- Add a position — can you afford it, and from when?
Each change can be switched on and off, so you can see what one is worth on its own and what they're worth together. Nothing changes your complement until you press Make these real.
"If I hold that vacancy until January, does it cover the overtime I'm about to overrun?" That's a two-minute answer here and a morning in a spreadsheet.
Questions people ask
Mostly about things that are deliberate.
Where are benefits?
Not here, on purpose. Benefits and bonuses are charged centrally in most public sector organisations and never reach a cost centre manager's budget. Counting them would make every forecast wrong by about 20%.
Why doesn't my year end on March 31?
26 pay periods × 14 days is 364 days, so the year ends a day or two short. That's correct as a payroll year and slightly odd against a calendar. Payroll posts in periods, so the app does too.
Acting pay is an estimate, but it's really a differential — why?
You're right, and it's on the list. Acting pay posts to basic pay as the difference between two levels, so properly it belongs on the position with dates. For now it's an estimate line, which is close enough to plan with and honest about being an approximation.
My rate doesn't match the collective agreement.
Then trust the agreement, not the app. Rate figures come from a published aggregator rather than Treasury Board directly, and every group follows its own agreement with its own effective dates. If a number matters, verify it — and tell me which one was wrong.
Can I track actuals against this?
Not yet. This plans the year; it doesn't reconcile it. Month-by-month actuals are the next thing, and whether they get built depends on whether the planning half proves useful first.
What about hourly-paid staff?
Supported. Twenty-three groups (the GL, GS, HP and HS families) are hourly, and the app costs them on assigned hours rather than an annual salary.
Your data
The short version: it never leaves your device.
There is no account, no server and no upload. Everything you type is stored by your own browser, on the device you typed it on. Nobody else can see it — not your colleagues, not your department, not me. That's why this link can be passed around freely.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- It doesn't sync. Set it up on your laptop and it isn't on your phone. Setup has a copy-out/paste-in box for moving a roster between devices, with names left out by default.
- Clearing your browser data clears this too. If you clear site data, use a private window, or your organisation wipes browser storage on a schedule, your roster goes with it. For anything you'd hate to retype, copy it out of Setup and keep it somewhere.
Check anything that matters against the ledger before you rely on it in a meeting.