Manage salary bands, record compensation changes and apply reviewed salary recommendations.
Access
Compensation pages require the COMPENSATION licence. view_compensation reads bands, history and reviews. manage_compensation enables band/review changes and the pay-equity report. Read and management permissions are separate.
Salary bands
A band contains name, level, grade, minimum/midpoint/maximum salary, currency, pay frequency, effective date and active state. Currency defaults to KES and frequency to monthly.
For placement and analytics, an employee's position band takes priority over a department-level band. Inactive and future-effective bands are excluded. When several match, latest effective date wins, then latest creation date.
Salary Bands shows placement alerts for employees below the minimum or above the maximum. Compa-ratio is base salary divided by the band midpoint. An employee with neither a matching position band nor a department fallback has no resolved band.
Compensation history
History records change type, previous/new salary, percentage change and effective date. Supported types include hire, promotion, merit increase, market adjustment, demotion, transfer, annual review, bonus, equity grant and correction.
Base-salary change types notify payroll's salary-structure listener. Bonus and equity-grant history rows do not rebase recurring salary; a history record alone is not a one-off payroll earning.
The web history page filters direct reports when manager scope applies and hides salary columns from viewers without management/full-admin access. These are display restrictions: the history API is company-scoped and returns salary fields to holders of view_compensation. Do not treat the hidden columns or team view as a confidentiality boundary when granting that permission.
Compensation reviews
Create a review with name, budget (fixed or payroll percentage), effective date and optional eligible departments. Empty department selection means company-wide eligibility.
| Status | Available stage |
|---|---|
| Draft / In Progress | Edit recommendations |
| Submitted | Await approval |
| Approved | Ready to apply |
| Applied | Salary changes applied |
| Cancelled | Cancelled state |
Open the worksheet to enter proposed salaries and notes. It rolls up proposed increases against the budget and warns about excess. A rejected recommendation is excluded from the budget increase and application. Only draft reviews can be deleted.
Merit suggestions
Suggestions combine the latest usable performance rating with the compa-ratio band. Ratings are normalised to a five-point scale. No usable rating defaults to Meets and is flagged; no usable compa-ratio uses the middle band. Suggestions can be applied individually or together and adjusted before saving.
| Compa-ratio interval | Exceptional | Exceeds | Meets | Below | Unsatisfactory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Below 0.80 | 10% | 8% | 5% | 2% | 0% |
| 0.80 to below 0.90 | 8% | 6% | 4% | 1% | 0% |
| 0.90 to below 1.10 | 6% | 5% | 3% | 0% | 0% |
| 1.10 to below 1.20 | 4% | 3% | 2% | 0% | 0% |
| 1.20 and above | 3% | 2% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
These percentages are the implemented merit matrix, not a promise of an increase.
Submit, approve and apply
Submit locks recommendations from editing. Approval requires submitted status. Apply requires approved status and at least one non-rejected recommendation.
Application re-reads each employee's live salary, writes the proposed salary and records history inside a transaction. A missing employee can be skipped; an invalid proposed salary aborts the transaction. If no change succeeds, application is rejected. Payroll salary-change events are emitted after commit.
The proposed salary remains the target amount; re-reading live salary changes the recorded previous salary and resulting increase, not the recommendation into an automatic percentage recalculation. Employee base salary is updated when Apply runs; the effective date is carried in history and the payroll event.
Pay equity
Pay Equity groups base salaries by salary band and department, then gender. Each cell reports employee count, mean and median; percentage gaps compare against the male median in that group.
For fewer than five employees in a gender cell, mean and median are withheld (n<5). Such a cell cannot supply a gap or its reference median. Groups whose absolute gap exceeds the selected threshold are flagged; the default threshold is 5%.
This is an aggregate comparison of recorded base salary. It does not establish equal work, explain a gap or certify compliance.