Switch-IO Budget App · Aria
The AI budget co-pilot that shows its math.
Aria answers complex workforce and finance questions in plain language while keeping every assumption, calculation, and source visible to your team.
In action
Ask anything. Get the full picture.
Aria answers in plain language with every assumption exposed. No black box. No guessing where the number came from.
You
Which department has the highest fringe load right now, and is it justified by the seniority mix?
Aria
Engineering carries a 29.4% fringe load — 5.3 pts above the company blended rate of 24.1%.
The difference is largely justified: 38% of the team is at L6+, where equity refresh accruals add ~4.8 pts to fringe. Strip out equity and Engineering lands at 24.6% — within 0.5 pt of the company average.
Bottom line: no corrective action needed unless you are planning to reduce senior headcount.
Sources
- · Roster snapshot · 34 positions · Oct 2025
- · Fringe rules · Engineering · 7 components
- · Salary bands · L1–L8 · FY2026
You
Show me the impact if we freeze Engineering headcount for Q3.
Aria
A Q3 freeze in Engineering saves approximately $1.84M against the current plan — mostly from deferred new-hire ramp costs and signing bonuses. Fringe load would drop to 27.1% as junior-level additions are paused.
Note: 3 open reqs currently in final-round interviews would need to be officially put on hold.
Sources
- · Open reqs · Engineering · 3 active
- · Comp model · new hire assumptions · FY2026
- · Scenario B-14 · Headcount freeze
Start Right
Start the way you actually plan.
Build method and planning cadence are different decisions, and Switch-IO doesn't pretend otherwise. Pick the intent that matches your year; Aria configures both — and tells you which she'd choose for your data, with her reasoning cited.
In Practice
One analyst. One week. Zero reconciliation.
MONDAY
Open the plan. It's already reconciled.
The month closed in your ERP, and your plan knows it. Actuals sync in, smart reconciliation flags inconsistencies, and VARIANCE() columns are populated and sorted before your first coffee. No import. No paste-special.
| BVA — JUNE | PLAN | ACTUAL | VAR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud infra | 184,000 | 191,730 | +4.2% |
| Contractors | 96,500 | 88,210 | −8.6% |
WEDNESDAY
Simulate the scenario. Watch the whole plan agree.
The CRO wants hiring pulled forward a quarter. You don't rebuild anything. Move the positions in a simulation, and comp, fringe, payroll tax, and the cash line recompute in 1.2 seconds — side by side with the base plan. In front of them. On the call.
| SCENARIO: PULL-FWD Q3 | START | Q3 IMPACT |
|---|---|---|
| Sr. Backend Eng | Q4 → Q3 | +68,400 |
| AE — entity A | Q4 → Q3 | +51,900 |
| → Cash EOP, Sep | −120,300 |
FRIDAY
Ship the report. It's not a screenshot.
The reporting engine turns the plan into narrative — dashboards, board slides, shareable variance reports — all linked to the same live cells. If a number changed Thursday night, the deck already knows. Click any figure and you get the number, with its receipts.
Engineering, Q3 fully loaded
One Platform
BI and FP&A were never
supposed to be separate.
Most stacks are six products wearing one login: plan in one place, analyze in another, present from a third, reconcile the differences forever. Switch-IO runs planning, analysis, and reporting on one real-time data structure. When a driver moves, everything agrees — instantly, because it was never separate.
Workforce Planning
Your biggest line item deserves better than "avg. salary × heads."
Aggregate headcount modeling is where budgets go to lie. Switch-IO pre-populates the plan from your active roster by legal entity and models the position, not the average — every seat with a start date, a level, a location, and entity-specific fringe. Equity refresh cycles land in the quarter they actually vest, not smeared across the year.
When someone leaves, the budget doesn't. A replacement placeholder holds the departing seat's cost with no vacancy gap by default — while growth hires live in their own plan, so net-new investment stays isolatable from holding the line.
A real fringe load, computed per-entity from statutory rules and benefits tables. Not a plug.
| POSITION | STATUS | FRINGE | LOADED / MO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sr. Backend Eng — entity B | Open · Q3 | 32.1% | 29,840 |
| Staff Eng — entity B | Backfill | 29.4% | 41,230 |
| └ Employer tax 12.6% · Benefits tier B 5.1% · Severance accrual 8.3% · Equity refresh 3.4% | |||
| AE — entity A | Open · Q3 | 21.7% | 18,660 |
| RevOps Analyst — entity A | Filled | 22.3% | 13,910 |
Traceability
Every number in this system will testify under oath.
Drill-down isn't a feature here. It's a constitutional right. Four levels, from board slide to raw ledger, and the thread never breaks. Aria's citations open into the same four levels.
POSITION
The board slide's "$4.31M Engineering" opens into the plan: which cost centers, which quarters.
COMPONENT
The row decomposes: base comp, fringe at 29.4%, equity refresh, allocated software.
SOURCE
Each component names its origin: the fringe table version, the account range, the assumption and who set it.
INPUT
The raw record: the journal entry, the ledger line, the timestamp, untouched.
Your auditors will think you're showing off. You are.
Trust & governance
Built for teams that need to be right.
Finance, FP&A, and HR teams can't afford AI that guesses. Aria is designed around verifiability — not confidence scores.
01
Source-cited answers
Every Aria response includes the exact data rows, rule files, and model assumptions that produced the number. If she cannot cite a source, she will say so.
02
No hallucination without citation
Aria is constrained to your data. She does not synthesize numbers from general knowledge. If the answer is not in your model, she tells you — not a plausible fiction.
03
You stay in control
Aria suggests and explains. Your team decides. She never writes back to the model, edits a cell, or takes autonomous action without an explicit human instruction.
04
Privacy-first by design
Your financial data never leaves your infrastructure to train a public model. Aria runs within your Switch-IO environment, subject to your existing access controls.
See Aria on your data
Thirty minutes with your actual numbers.
Bring your headcount or budget data. See how Aria reasons, what she cites, and where she stops.