Key Dates

The Key Dates section is one of the quickest parts of a comp cycle configuration. Most of the dates here are purely for reference and have no system functionality tied to them — with one important exception.

You'll see four timeline dates in this section:

These dates populate the cycle timeline for reference purposes only. They do not drive any system behavior. For example, if the Review Start date passes and no one has clicked Launch, the cycle will not launch itself. After a cycle is launched, these dates can still be edited.

This is an optional checkbox tied to the All Reviews Due date. When enabled, any manager who has not submitted their review by that date will have their review automatically skipped — not just to the next approver level, but all the way to the top of the cycle. This happens at approximately 9:30 AM UTC the day after the due date.

We generally do not recommend using this setting. Within the cycle, you can manually skip individual reviews up one level at a time, which gives far more control. The auto-skip is all-or-nothing — everyone who hasn't submitted gets escalated to the very top simultaneously, with no ability to be selective.

If a customer does use this setting, the All Reviews Due date becomes functionally important, as the auto-skip triggers based on it.

This is the most important date on the entire Key Dates screen. It determines what org data the comp cycle will use.

Any data effective on or before this date will be recognized by the cycle. Any data effective after this date will be ignored.

Example: If an employee is in the Product department on August 14th (the reference date) and moves to Engineering on August 20th, the comp cycle will show them as being in Product — because that's where they were as of the reference date.

Once the comp cycle ends, all pay changes are written back to the org with an effective date. Without a reference date cutoff, those new pay values would get pulled back into the cycle and it would appear as though no changes occurred. The reference date prevents this by locking what data the cycle sees.

Confirm with the customer: when this cycle ends and pay changes go into effect, what will the effective date of those changes be? The org data reference date must be set to a date before that payroll effective date.

Example: If pay changes will be effective September 1st, the reference date can be set anywhere up to August 31st — but not September 1st or later, or the incoming pay changes will corrupt the cycle. A warning flag will appear in the UI if the reference date is set on or after the payroll effective date.

Once the cycle is launched, the org data reference date is locked and cannot be modified. It must be confirmed and set correctly before clicking Launch.