Market cycles are tightening, workforces are more distributed, and AI is reshaping operating models faster than most teams can track. The rules of thumb finance leaders once relied on — the “right” ratio of G&A to revenue, the typical size of an Accounting team at $50M, how much to spend on FP&A tools — don’t map cleanly to the realities of this new environment.
But planning without benchmarks isn’t an option. You still need to hire, budget, and build. You just can’t do it based on gut feel or outdated advice.
That’s why The F Suite published the 2025 Headcount & Operating Expenses Report: a comprehensive look at how real companies are structuring teams and deploying capital across various stages of growth. Based on member survey data across eight revenue bands, the report gives finance leaders a grounded way to compare their organization to peers and make confident decisions about 2026 planning.
Below is a snapshot of what we found.
(And if you want to access the full report and more like it, apply for membership today.)
Key takeaways
R&D percentage of spend shrinks fast once revenue starts flowing. Median R&D headcount drops at $5M-$20M in revenue as GTM and G&A hiring ramps.
$100M is the biggest structural inflection point. Crossing this threshold triggers the steepest scaling jump in the dataset. Accounting ICs surge and Security and Biz Ops teams expand into multi-manager functions.
G&A spending stabilizes earlier than most teams expect. After peaking at the $5M-$20M band, G&A OPEX drops and finds stability from $20M through $200M.
Sales & Marketing stays a consistent growth engine. Across $5M-$200M, S&M expenses remain steady, reflecting its role as an active, continuous investment rather than a cost center that grows and shrinks with time.
Finance tooling budgets scale exponentially with complexity. By $500M+, companies spend in the seven-figure range on Financial Reporting tools and FP&A, compared to low-five-figure budgets in earlier stages.
How organizations shift headcount plans as they scale
One trend in this year’s analysis is how unevenly headcount evolves as companies grow.
Product teams stay larger for longer. Even after companies commercialize, most continue investing heavily in product and engineering. Instead of tapering into a small late-stage function, R&D remains an anchor of the organization well into the mid-market and beyond.
GTM capacity peaks early. Sales teams expand quickly once revenue appears, but their relative share of headcount levels off much sooner than most expect. As companies scale, they generate more output without expanding quota-carrying teams at the same pace.
G&A grows in concentrated steps, not a smooth line. Most back-office functions stay lean through the earlier revenue bands. Then, once operational load hits a certain point, teams break out rapidly with Accounting, Finance, Security, and Legal each hitting their own inflection moments.
Today, organizations aren’t following a clean “build, sell, scale” sequence as they go from early-stage to growth-stage to late-stage. They stretch certain teams, compress others, and move capacity around based on product complexity, customer model, and operational pressure.
Operating expense benchmarks across revenue stages
The expense data shows something most finance leaders intuit, but rarely see laid out clearly: different departments become more efficient at different moments in the growth curve, and the timing doesn’t always match the traditional “early-stage vs. later-stage” expectations.
R&D is the clearest example. Early on, product development dominates the cost structure. But once revenue grows and the product stabilizes, R&D spend declines sharply as a share of revenue. Companies simply get more efficient at translating product investment into output.
Sales and Marketing behave differently. Instead of swinging wildly between bands, GTM spend stays surprisingly stable from the moment companies hit meaningful revenue through the mid-market. Teams adjust tactics, but the overall commitment to acquisition remains consistent.
Customer Success and Account Management follow their own arc. After the early scale-up period, these expenses fall meaningfully as companies lean more on product maturity, automation, and streamlined onboarding to support a larger customer base without proportional increases in spend.
Cost of Revenue also becomes more efficient with growth, though the path is bumpier. Some companies see temporary spikes around infrastructure rework or delivery-model changes, especially in the mid-market, while others transition smoothly into more scalable operating patterns.
The bigger pattern is that each line compresses on its own timeline. Some stabilize early, others only settle once operational complexity forces different choices. And because those timelines vary, simple “target ratios” usually miss the point — what matters is understanding whether a company is ahead of or behind the efficiency curve for its stage.
How companies invest in finance infrastructure
Finance tooling follows one of the steepest upgrade curves in the entire dataset. Most companies hold off on major investments longer than expected, then hit a point in the growth journey where the manual model stops working and the spend ramps fast.
A few clear patterns emerge:
Financial reporting systems are usually the first major upgrade. Early-stage teams stretch lightweight tools surprisingly far. But once revenue scales, compliance and close timelines tighten and companies pivot to more robust reporting infrastructure. The shift typically happens as they move out of the early revenue bands and into the mid-market.
FP&A spend accelerates later, but more aggressively. Many companies remain spreadsheet-heavy well into eight figures of revenue. The real investment comes once forecasting complexity, board expectations, and planning cycles outgrow manual models. Past that point, FP&A becomes a core budget line, not an add-on.
Quote-to-cash tooling matures in stages. Contracting, billing, and collections workflows evolve in bursts. Early solutions are simple. Later stages require deeper integration, better controls, and automation that can handle volume without adding headcount.
Equity and compliance tooling scale with organizational maturity. As teams grow and compensation structures evolve, companies transition from basic cap table management to more specialized systems that support valuations, modeling, and audit readiness.
The common thread is that companies underinvest in finance infrastructure until complexity forces their hand. However, with the growing maturity of AI finance tools, there are increasing opportunities to add point solutions to the stack for pressing pain points,
Why headcount and OPEX budgeting doesn’t follow a standard playbook
Companies at the same revenue level often take very different approaches to headcount and OPEX budgeting. For G&A, Sales, and early-stage R&D headcount, the difference between investment for the 10th percentile of respondents and the 90th percentile can be upwards of 40 percentage points.
The gaps aren’t mistakes or outliers. They reflect real differences in product strategy, customer mix, capital structure, and how teams choose to sequence their investments. The spread is the point: it’s what makes simple ratios and blanket rules unreliable for planning.
Understanding where your organization fits within that range is far more useful than following a generic benchmark. The full Headcount and Operating Expenses Report gives you that broader context, along with the data cuts and dashboards to compare your structure to hundreds of peers.
To access the complete report and the rest of the F Suite library, apply for membership.