About

Parloa is one of Europe's leading AI Agent Management Platforms for enterprise contact center automation. Founded in 2018 in Berlin by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald, Parloa helps global enterprises automate and enhance customer interactions across phone, chat, and messaging channels. The company has raised over $560M and is backed by General Catalyst, Altimeter Capital, EQT Ventures, and Durable Capital, among others.

Challenge

Scaling headcount across two continents — with no system to match

Since its Series B, Parloa has grown at a pace most companies only plan for. Expanding from Berlin into New York, adding new legal entities, currencies, and hundreds of employees — the organizational complexity quickly outgrew the tools Finance had in place.

Finance had built a sophisticated headcount planning setup: Google Sheets pre-populated with salary bands, connected to HiBob for actuals and to Asana via automated triggers. For a while, it worked. Then the integrations broke — and the process collapsed.

Hiring managers bypassed Finance and went directly to Talent Acquisition with ad-hoc requests. TA was managing open roles across two entities with no structured overview. Finance had no real-time visibility — only a monthly payroll export, by which point decisions had already been made.

"I lost total control of who was being hired, how they were being hired, and what the budget was. I could only see the headcount numbers at the end of the month when payroll landed."

Yasemin Erensoy

Lead FP&A Partner at Parloa

Solution

One platform to connect planning, hiring, and reporting

After evaluating multiple tools, Parloa chose Basqo as the single platform bridging Finance and People & Culture. The deciding factor was simple: every alternative solved for one side of the process but not both.

TA-focused tools offered rich pipeline analytics but gave Finance no live cost tracking. FP&A platforms provided budgeting frameworks but had no process layer for hiring managers or TA to work within day-to-day. Basqo did both and its native integrations with HiBob and Greenhouse meant that planned roles, actuals, and hiring progress could all live in one place.

"The decision for Basqo was because it could do what two tools would normally do — in one tool."

Yasemin Erensoy

Lead FP&A Partner at Parloa

How did they build aliggnment across two teams? By answering: what are the must-haves for each side, versus the nice-to-haves? Basqo cleared the bar for both.

Results

From reactive to real-time: headcount planning that scales with Parloa

>75% reduction in monthly reporting time

Monthly headcount reporting that used to take two hours now takes less than 30 minutes. With data centralized in Basqo and kept in sync with HiBob and Greenhouse, Yasemin's morning routine now includes a quick daily check rather than a monthly scramble to reconcile exports from multiple systems.

>80% of commercial managers complete their own budgets

In the first planning cycle run on Google Sheets, Yasemin had to complete budget inputs for more than 50% of commercial team members herself. In the first full budgeting cycle with Basqo, more than 80% of the commercial organization completed their own budgets — using pre-populated salary bands and an interface that required no finance expertise.

Large number of open roles tracked across EU and US in one place

TA currently manages dozens of active openings through Basqo, all matched to Greenhouse IDs. Finance and Talent Acquisition share the same real-time view of hiring progress — and if a hiring manager pushes for an unplanned role, TA's response is simple: is it in Basqo?

No unexpected budget deviations

With structured approval workflows, any change to the headcount plan is visible and sanctioned before it reaches payroll. The relevant stakeholders approve new roles explicitly — meaning Finance knows exactly what to expect at month-end.

"There is no budget deviation that isn't expected. If there's a deviation, they already know why — because they approved it."

Yasemin Erensoy

Lead FP&A Partner at Parloa

30-60 hiring managers with self-serve visibility

The increasing number of hiring managers across Parloa now have a clear, always-current view of their team's headcount plan, open roles, and budget utilization — directly in Basqo, without needing to request a report from Finance.

"Dynamic, growing companies — especially those going through a lot of change in team structures should use Basqo. And for companies that want the whole planning-to-hiring loop to happen in one place, rather than having different systems for budget tracking, reporting, and hiring."

Yasemin Erensoy

Lead FP&A Partner at Parloa