For years I watched CFOs take a headcount case to the board and lose it, and I assumed the case was the problem. Tighter payback. Clearer risk if the role stays vacant. Better numbers.

The case was rarely the problem. The board was not saying the role is not worth having. They were saying there is nowhere to take it from.

Budget season is where that gets settled, and it is also where the answer is sitting in plain view. Walk your indirect categories. Facilities and utilities. Professional services, which means legal, advisory, audit and the consulting engagement that never quite ended. Marketing services, agencies and media and the software the marketing team buys on its own card. Travel and expense. Each one is small enough that nobody escalates it, and each one is rolling into next year on last year's number plus a little.

None of them individually looks like a hire. Together they routinely dwarf categories your leadership team actively manages, and they are the only part of the cost base where a real recovery touches nobody's job and nobody's project.

So the headcount conversation and the indirect spend conversation are the same conversation. Your business holds them in different meetings, with different people, months apart. The first one asks for permission. The second one is never scheduled.

The question worth taking into your next leadership meeting: if we had to fund the role we keep deferring out of categories nobody owns, which four would we open first?

"We did a market review last year. Everyone moved."

The hour you cannot find for your controller is an hour you are borrowing from yourself at a punishing rate.

You know exactly who is at risk. You could name them right now without opening payroll. The financial accountant who has been approached twice this year. The maintenance planner nobody else in the region can replace. The payroll officer who holds every historical award interpretation in her head.

Knowing is not the hard part.

The hard part is that naming them means naming everybody else too, and in a room with your HR lead and your CEO that conversation turns political inside a minute. So the across-the-board review is not laziness. It is conflict avoidance with a methodology attached, and it is genuinely defensible: it benchmarks to market, it treats people consistently, and it hands the board one clean sentence about how you answered wage pressure.

It also assumes there is one labour market.

Your payroll file holds three. There are roles where supply is loose, where candidates are available and market pay is barely moving, and a blanket rise there is a transfer of value to people who could not credibly leave you. There are roles where supply is tight but mobile, mid-level finance, operations, specialist commercial, where market is the floor rather than the answer. And there are roles where supply is genuinely broken, certain skilled trades on the east coast, clinical staff in regional aged care, where market is whatever the last candidate accepted and may already be out of date before your review lands.

The blanket review treats all three as one. Loose-supply roles get a rise the business never had to give. Broken-supply roles get one that was needed months earlier, at the wrong level. The credibility of the whole exercise gets spent on the wrong people.

The CFOs who keep the people they cannot replace are the ones who stopped asking whether they pay market and started asking what premium they are paying, for what scarcity, in which roles.

Do nothing and the review will read beautifully in the board pack, and the maintenance planner will still resign in March.