Apply approved increases

What this achieves

Applying a cycle writes every approved increase onto the employee records it belongs to. This is the step where proposals stop being proposals and become what someone is paid.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Check the effective date on the cycle. That date is what gets written onto each record and what payroll reads the salary from, so it decides which pay run the increase first appears in.

Check the plan statuses too. Applying settles what was approved; it does not revisit anything skipped, rejected, or still awaiting revision.

Steps

Go to Compensation → Cycles and open the approved cycle.
Review the Budget Used and Avg Increase figures against what you expected.
Select Apply Changes.
Check the cycle’s status now reads Applied.

What application writes

Each approved plan writes a new salary onto its employee’s record, dated with the cycle’s effective date. The change also lands in that employee’s compensation history, so the record shows a dated sequence rather than a figure that was quietly overwritten.

Nothing has to be entered a second time. A merit increase arriving this way is the same kind of record as a pay change entered by hand, which is why it appears on the employee’s compensation tab afterwards.

Example: an engineer at HC Corp UK Ltd approved for 4% on a cycle effective 1 April 2026 has that salary on their record from 1 April, and their previous salary remains readable against the dates it applied to.

How the increase reaches payroll

Payroll reads the salary from the employee record on the next run, taking the version in force for that pay date. There is no separate step to push a cycle into payroll and no re-keying.

The consequence is that the effective date does the work. An increase effective 1 April is picked up by the April run because that is the version in force when the run reads the record; applying the same cycle after April’s run has been finalised does not reopen it, and the difference becomes a payroll correction rather than a compensation one.

Example: applying HC Corp UK Ltd’s cycle on 28 March for a 1 April effective date means the April payroll run pays the new salaries without anyone re-entering them.

Applying is the end of the cycle

An applied cycle is finished. Its plans are marked as applied, and the cycle is a record of what was decided rather than a workspace.

A correction after this point is made against the employee record, or through payroll where a period has already been paid — not by reopening the cycle.

What happens next

Employees are paid the new salary from the next run whose pay date falls on or after the effective date. The increase appears in their compensation history and feeds the merit line of their total rewards statement for the year.