Merit cycles: an overview

How a merit cycle moves from draft to applied, who does what, and what each tab is for.

Written By Karl

Last updated 1 day ago

A merit cycle is a planned round of pay increases. Administrators set the budget and rules, managers propose increases for their teams, proposals are reviewed in the approval flow, and administrators apply the result to pay records in Evenpay. Evenpay does not make salary or bonus payments; those remain in your organisation's payroll system.

Where: Compensation → Merit Cycles.

The lifecycle

Status	What happens
Draft	An administrator sets up the cycle. Nothing is visible to managers yet.
Active	The cycle is launched. Managers fill in and submit worksheets, and proposals are reviewed.
In Approval	An administrator has closed the cycle. Managers cannot submit new proposals. Proposals already submitted can still be reviewed, and returned proposals can be resubmitted. See the cycle lifecycle guide below for the Close action.
Applied	The application process has completed and the cycle is locked. Individual reviews can have been skipped, so reconcile the result before assuming every approved change reached the employee records.
Cancelled	The cycle was stopped before it was applied.

Before payroll transfer: check individual review results and affected employee records. Applying writes changes during the application process; a future effective date is recorded but does not defer the write. See Launching, closing, applying and cancelling a cycle for timing, skipped-review checks and the payroll handoff.

Who does what

Administrators create, configure, launch, close, apply and cancel cycles within their permitted scope. Actions on worksheets remain subject to workflow and own-pay restrictions.
Managers fill in and submit worksheets for their teams. See Filling in and submitting your merit worksheet.

The cycle page

Select New Merit Cycle, give it a Name, and the cycle opens with three tabs:

Settings: timeline, participants, budgets, rules, approval flow and worksheets. Changes save automatically.
Worksheets: progress per manager and per employee once the cycle is live.
Insights: budget, progress, distribution and the projected effect on compa-ratio and the pay gap.

The cycles list

The list shows each cycle's name, status, employees, budget, progress, deadline, creator and entity. You can Duplicate a cycle to reuse its setup, or archive it.

Next steps

Good to know

Merit Cycles is in the sidebar for administrators. If you're an administrator and don't see it, contact Evenpay support.

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