Review and approve proposals

What this achieves

Review is where an administrator decides each proposal a manager submitted. Approving them settles what the cycle will pay, but still changes nobody’s record — that happens when the cycle is applied.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Close submissions first. While the cycle is still in Planning, managers can keep changing what you are reviewing.

Steps

Go to Compensation → Cycles and open the cycle.
Select Close Submissions.
Under Plans, filter by Status or search by employee name.
On each row, select Approve, Reject, or Revise.
To approve the submitted proposals together, select Approve All Submitted.
When every proposal is decided, select Approve Cycle.

The three row actions

Option	Description
Approve	The proposal stands and counts as committed against the budget.
Reject	The proposal is refused. The manager sees the reason you give.
Revise	The proposal goes back to the manager to change, with a reason.

Reject and revise both require a reason, and both show it to the manager. The difference is what you want to happen next: a rejected plan is finished, a revised one is expected back.

Example: Olivia Bennett proposing 9% for an engineer already near the top of their band is a candidate for revision rather than rejection, because the case may be sound at a smaller figure.

Over-budget proposals

What happens to a proposal that exceeds its department’s budget depends on how the cycle was configured.

Option	Description
Strict budget	The proposal cannot be approved while it exceeds the budget.
Flexible budget	You are asked to confirm the over-budget approval and give a reason, which is recorded as an audited override.

The row carries an Over budget marker, and an approved override is marked as such afterwards, so an exception stays visible on the cycle rather than disappearing into the total.

Example: approving £4,000 more than Engineering’s envelope at HC Corp UK Ltd on a flexible cycle records who approved it and why, and the row keeps the override marker.

Approving the cycle with plans still pending

Approve Cycle expects every plan to be decided. Where plans are still in draft or submitted, you are warned first, and continuing marks each of them Skipped.

A skipped plan means that employee receives no increase in this cycle. Plans you deliberately rejected or sent back for revision are left as they are.

This is the most consequential confirmation in the section, and it usually appears at the end of a cycle when time has run out. Read the counts it shows you before continuing: they are the number of people about to get nothing, and a manager who never finished looks identical to a decision not to award.

What happens next

The cycle moves to Approved. Approved proposals are settled but not yet real: no employee record has changed and payroll has read nothing. Applying the cycle is the separate step that writes the increases.