Share one HR spreadsheet, hide the salary columns
One workbook. Finance sees compensation, managers see headcount and titles, and the recruiter sees open roles. Nobody maintains four copies that drift apart by Thursday.
The situation
HR keeps the truth in one spreadsheet: names, titles, teams, start dates, salary, bonus. Finance needs all of it. Hiring managers need everything except compensation. Today the fix is exporting a copy, deleting columns by hand, emailing it, and hoping nobody forwards the wrong version. Then a title changes and every copy is stale.
The recipe
- Desktop appOpen the workbook in Honeycake on macOS or Windows and choose Layer Bake.
- Desktop appPick the Salary and Bonus columns as a layer. Grant that layer to the people who may see compensation:
maria.finance@co.comandana.chro@co.com. - Desktop appGrant the whole file to the managers who need headcount:
dev.lee@co.com,sam.eng@co.com,priya.ops@co.com. Set a time to live, say 90 days. Bake. - Any channelSend the one
headcount.xlsx.cakehowever you like: email, Slack, Drive, Teams. The protection is inside the file, so the channel does not matter. - PortalSomeone new joins Finance? Add them in the Portal. Someone leaves? Rescind just that person. The file everyone already has updates on their next Open.
What each reader sees
Finance
The full workbook, salary and bonus included, as a normal Excel file.
Hiring managers
Names, titles, teams, start dates. The salary and bonus cells read [REDACTED]. Still a real workbook that sorts and filters.
Anyone else
Nothing. The file will not Open, and the blocked attempt shows up in your audit trail.
Why it works
- Each layer is encrypted to its own reader set inside the same file. There is no second copy to leak.
- Recipients Open it on whatever they have: Mac, Windows, phone, or the browser. Opening is free and needs nothing installed.
- Your documents never touch our servers. We hand out access to keys, never the workbook.