Introduction to Flowstate

Flowstate is a workforce planning, headcount management, and financial forecasting platform purpose-built for engineering organizations. It gives engineering leaders a single system of record for tracking who works on what, how much it costs, and what happens if things change.

What Flowstate Models

At its core, Flowstate represents your engineering workforce through five primary entities:

Entity	What it represents
Employees	Full-time and part-time staff with salaries, team assignments, and project allocations
Contractors	External individuals or firms engaged on a rate basis (hourly, daily, or monthly)
Vacancies	Open positions in the hiring pipeline, with target salary ranges and fill dates
Teams	Organizational units that group people together for management and cost attribution
Projects	Work efforts that consume resources, tracked through lifecycle stages with timelines

These entities are connected by allocations -- FTE-based assignments that link people to teams and projects. An employee allocated at 0.5 FTE to a team contributes half their working capacity (and half their cost) to that team. Allocations are the foundation of every cost calculation in the system.

The Cost Calculation Chain

Flowstate computes workforce costs through a multi-step pipeline. Understanding this chain is essential for interpreting forecasts and configuring the system correctly.

Employee Salary
  --> Currency Conversion (normalize to reporting currency)
    --> Working Days Proration (account for start/end dates within a period)
      --> FTE Allocation (split cost across teams and projects)
        --> Overhead Multiplier (apply work-type-specific overhead %)
          --> Bonuses (add fixed bonus amounts, not FTE-prorated)
            = Total Employee Cost

Each step in the chain depends on configuration entities:

• Exchange Rates power currency conversion
• Work Types define overhead percentages per employment classification
• Cost Centres group costs for budget tracking
• Value Streams categorize projects by business capability
• Geographies associate employees with regions that affect working-day calculations

TIP

Contractor costs follow a simpler path: rate multiplied by FTE allocation, with no overhead multiplier applied. See the Contractors guide for details.

Live Data vs Scenario Planning

Flowstate maintains two layers of data:

Live data is the source of truth. It reflects the current state of your organization -- who is employed today, what teams exist, which projects are active. Live data is what integrations sync against and what the API returns by default.

Scenarios (also called plans) are isolated workspaces where you can model changes without affecting live data. Want to see what happens if you hire five engineers in Q3? Create a scenario, add five vacancies, and review the cost forecast. If the plan is approved, merge it into live data. If not, discard it.

This two-layer architecture means you can run multiple what-if analyses in parallel -- a headcount plan, a budget scenario, a restructuring proposal -- all without interfering with each other or with production data.

Read more in the Scenarios & Plans guide.

Configuration Entities

Before Flowstate can calculate costs accurately, you need to set up a handful of configuration entities. These are organizational settings that rarely change but have a significant impact on financial outputs.

Configuration	Purpose	Documentation
Work Types	Employment classifications (e.g., "Full-time", "Part-time") with overhead percentages	Configuration
Cost Centres	Budget tracking groups for financial allocation	Configuration
Value Streams	Business capability groupings applied to projects	Configuration
Exchange Rates	Currency conversion rates used in multi-currency organizations	Configuration
Geographies	Regions and locations that affect working-day calculations	Configuration
Job Roles	Role definitions (e.g., "Senior Engineer", "Engineering Manager")	Configuration

WARNING

Cost calculations depend on these configuration entities being set up correctly. Missing exchange rates or work types will result in incomplete or incorrect forecasts.

The REST API

Flowstate provides a RESTful API for programmatic access to all workforce data. The API operates on live data by default but supports scenario-scoped queries by passing a scenarioId query parameter.

All endpoints are scoped to your organization:

https://{tenant}.flowstate.inc/api/v1/org/:orgId

Authentication uses API keys passed in the Authorization header. See the Authentication guide for setup instructions, and the API Reference for the full endpoint catalog.

Next Steps

Work through the remaining Getting Started guides in order to build a complete understanding of the data model:

1. Scenarios & Plans -- How what-if planning works
2. Employees -- The employee lifecycle, salaries, and cost attribution
3. Vacancies -- Modeling the hiring pipeline
4. Contractors -- Managing external workforce
5. Teams -- Organizational structure and team allocations
6. Projects -- Project tracking and resource planning
7. Cost Attribution -- How costs flow through the system
8. Exchange Rates -- Multi-currency support
9. Work Types -- Employment classifications and overhead