Core position control
The part no HRIS or payroll system is actually built to do.
- Positions and people are separate records. A position persists through turnover — status (filled, vacant, overfilled) is calculated automatically, never typed in by hand.
- Overfill detection. If combined incumbent FTE on a position goes over 1.0, it's flagged automatically — not left for someone to notice.
- FTE and Budgeted Annual Cost are always calculated. Real formulas, server-side, every time — never hand-typed, never able to drift from the inputs.
- Full permanent audit history. Every field change on every position and incumbent: before/after values, who, when, and a free-text reason. Nothing is ever purged.
Budgeting & reporting
Depth most position-control tools at this price don't have.
- Budget Adjustments. Build up to 5 named working budget versions, adjust them in bulk or line by line, compare to the live budget, and promote the one that's approved — the live budget is untouched until you do.
- Custom Report Builder. Any column, any filter, saved named configurations you can reuse.
- Three real export formats. CSV, formatted Excel with live
=SUM()formulas (not static numbers), and PDF with the paper size and font scaled automatically so wide reports don't wrap. - Interactive onscreen org chart with cost, FTE, and vacancy rollups at every branch, not just the leaves.
- One-click org chart export. Reporting lines, cost, FTE, and vacancies, as a spreadsheet built to drop straight into Lucidchart, Visio, or whatever diagram tool you already use.
- Up to 8 configurable org levels, labeled however your organization actually talks — Division, Fund, Grant, School Site, whatever fits.
- Grant and fund-restricted position tracking, with allocation and end date — built for exactly what federal grant compliance (2 CFR 200.430) requires.
How you buy it
The part that's actually different from every enterprise competitor.
- Flat, published, self-serve pricing by position count. No per-seat fees, no metering, no hidden tiers.
- Never a "contact us" tier, at any size. Even above 3,000 positions, a published overage keeps it self-serve.
- 14-day free trial, no credit card. See your own data working the same day — no demo required, ever.
- Self-serve upgrade, downgrade, and cancel, in-app, with no retention flow to get through.
- One-click full data export, anytime. Positions and incumbents to CSV — no lock-in.
- CSV bulk import with column mapping and duplicate detection, so switching from a spreadsheet or another system is fast.
Trust
Why you can hand this to Finance, HR, and an auditor at the same time.
- Multi-tenant data isolation enforced automatically at the data layer — not bolted on per query.
- Role-based access (Owner, Admin, Editor, Read-Only) so Finance, HR, and Budget can share one system without over-exposing write access.
- GFOA's own published Ten Steps to Implementing Position Control map directly onto what's already built — independent validation, not self-graded marketing. See the full mapping.
- Trusted, not trendy. PowerPCS runs on PHP and MySQL — the same stack behind roughly 70% of the websites on the internet, including WordPress, Wikipedia, Slack, and Etsy.[1] It's bulletproof by now, not experimental: three decades of production hardening, security patches still shipping, a huge pool of people who can maintain it. No risk of betting your position data on a framework that's fashionable this year and unmaintainable next.
[1] W3Techs, "Usage Statistics and Market Share of PHP for Websites," accessed November 2026. WordPress and Wikipedia's MediaWiki are both built in PHP; Slack has written publicly about building its core application in PHP ("Taking PHP Seriously," slack.engineering).