Guidelines & Thresholds

overview guidelines & thresholds are an optional feature used in roughly 30% of comp cycles they allow you to configure rules that automatically pre populate employees' raises when the cycle launches — most commonly based on performance rating how guidelines work a guideline defines a rule when we launch the cycle, pre populate this field with this value for these employees you can create multiple guidelines in a single cycle (e g , one for merit increases, one for promotions) each guideline has a label (e g , "merit increase") for your own reference — this label does not appear inside the live cycle configuration options who does the guideline apply to? default is all eligible employees, but you can scope it for example, a merit increase guideline might exclude employees who are being promoted, since their raise will be handled separately what field gets pre populated? choose the field in the cycle that the guideline should write a value into (e g , base annualized raise %) target value vs target value and range almost always use target value only the target is what gets pre populated the range option is rarely used does the calculation depend on field values? no — same for everyone pre populate every eligible employee with the same value example pre populate everyone at 3% yes — varies by field value the most common setup pre populate based on performance rating (or another field) example rating pre populated raise outstanding 5% effective 3% under 1% pre populate checkbox you must check the pre populate checkbox for the guideline to actually write values into the cycle at launch if unchecked, the guideline is configured but won't do anything flags (thresholds) you can optionally set a flag value on a guideline the flag defines an acceptable range around the pre populated value example pre populated raise is 3%, flag is set to 2 managers can enter any value, but if they go below 1% or above 5% (3% ± 2), the cell will be highlighted to signal the entry is outside the recommended range flags do not block the entry — they only surface a visual indicator managers can still save whatever value they choose multiple guidelines a cycle can have more than one guideline a common pattern is one guideline for merit employees a separate guideline for promoted employees each guideline can have its own scope, field, and calculation logic ⚠️ important guidelines only run once at launch when you click launch, the guideline runs immediately — pre populating values based on the data as it exists at that exact moment after launch, the guideline effectively no longer exists the cycle will not re run it or automatically update any values what this means in practice if an employee doesn't have a performance rating at the time of launch, they won't get pre populated adding the rating after launch will not trigger a pre population — that value will need to be entered manually if a rating changes after launch (e g , outstanding is revised down to effective), the pre populated raise will not automatically update from 5% to 3% the guideline already ran managers may have already edited values by the time any data changes happen, so auto updating would create conflicts always confirm that the data the guideline depends on (e g , performance ratings) is finalized before clicking launch