Launch a cycle and set budgets

What this achieves

Launching a cycle creates one plan for every participant and opens the cycle to their managers. It is also the point at which departmental budgets come into existence, so allocating them is part of the same task.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Check the scope, the merit matrix, and the effective date on the draft. Launching creates a plan per participant from the population you chose, so scope is much harder to correct afterwards.

Steps

Go to Compensation → Cycles.
Open the cycle you want to launch.
Select Launch Cycle.
Under Budget Breakdown, review the departmental rows now created.
Set the Allocated amount for each department.
Check the cycle’s status now reads Planning.

Budgets do not exist before launch

The screen says so directly: budgets are created on cycle launch. There is nothing to allocate on a draft cycle, and a cycle you have not launched shows no departmental rows at all.

That ordering is deliberate. A budget row belongs to a department that actually has participants in this cycle, and that is not known until the plans are created.

What the budget columns mean

Option	Description
Allocated	The envelope you have given this department for this cycle.
Proposed	The total of proposals that managers have entered but not had approved.
Committed	The total of proposals that have been approved.
Remaining	What is left of the allocation.
Utilization	How much of the allocation is used.

Proposed and committed are kept apart on purpose. A manager who has entered proposals has not yet spent anything, and showing the two as one figure would either overstate the spend or hide it.

Example: if Engineering at HC Corp UK Ltd is allocated £120,000 and Olivia Bennett has proposed £95,000 that nobody has approved, the department has committed nothing and £95,000 is pending against the envelope.

Managers see what is left before they submit

Pending spend rolls up as proposals arrive, so a manager sees the remaining figure while they are still deciding rather than discovering the position when a proposal is rejected. This is the main practical reason to allocate budgets promptly after launch: until you do, managers are proposing against nothing.

What the cycle stage now controls

Once the cycle is in Planning, managers can enter and submit proposals. When you are ready to stop them, Close Submissions moves the cycle to In Review and hands it back to you.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd closes submissions on 25 March, after which Olivia Bennett can no longer change what she proposed for her engineers.

What happens next

Managers work through their teams and submit proposals, which arrive against the departmental budgets you set. When submissions close, the cycle moves to review, where each proposal is approved, rejected, or sent back.