Launching, closing, applying and cancelling a cycle

A merit cycle moves forward with four actions on the cycle page. Some of them can't be undone, so read what each one does before you use it.

Who can do this: Administrators.

Where: Compensation → Merit Cycles → open a cycle.

Launch

Select Launch Cycle. In Launch Merit Cycle, choose:

• Send announcement email to managers

• Send reminders before the deadline (needs announcement emails)

• Invite missing managers to Evenpay

The cycle becomes Active and managers can start on their worksheets.

Close

Select Close cycle when you're ready to stop new submissions, usually after the submission deadline. The cycle moves to In Approval:

• managers can no longer submit new proposals;

• proposals already submitted can still be approved, and returned ones resubmitted;

• leftover budget is settled.

Apply

Select Apply cycle. Every proposal must be approved or declined first. Applying processes approved salary and one-time bonus changes, records successfully applied changes in employee history with the source Merit cycle, and locks the cycle.

Effective date and application time

Applying commits changes to Evenpay's records during the application process. The review's effective date is recorded with those changes; it does not instruct the application process to wait until that day before writing them. A background job for a large cycle is not a schedule for the future effective date.

Before applying future-dated changes, confirm how your reporting and payroll process should handle them. Contact Evenpay support if you need to verify their treatment in a particular screen, calculation or export.

Check the result before payroll transfer

The cycle's Applied status alone does not confirm that every approved proposal was written successfully. An individual review can be skipped, for example when a required pay component is missing, inactive or incompatible with the proposed change.

Reconcile the application result and individual review statuses with the approved proposals. Investigate any skipped reviews and verify the affected employee records before transferring changes to payroll. If the result is unclear, contact support before retrying or recreating changes; do not assume that an already applied cycle can simply be applied again.

Payroll and payment: Evenpay does not pay salaries or bonuses. Applying a cycle updates the records in Evenpay. Your organisation processes the actual payments in its own payroll system. Whether approved salary changes and one-time bonus information are transferred automatically to a connected HR or payroll system depends on the integration and its configuration. Other workflows may require an SFTP transfer or CSV export. Confirm the configured transfer method and verify the receiving system before assuming the changes were transferred.

Applying can't be undone in bulk. Large cycles are applied in the background; wait for processing to finish before reconciling the result.

Cancel

Select Cancel cycle, type "cancel" to confirm, and select Cancel Cycle. You can only cancel a cycle in Draft or Active.

Cancelling deletes every proposal in the cycle permanently, not just drafts.

Export

Export CSV downloads the cycle's proposals at any stage.

Good to know

• If some proposals are still pending, ask the approvers to act, or approve or decline them yourself on the Worksheets tab, before you apply.

• To reuse a cycle's setup next year, Duplicate it from the cycles list.

Related articles

• The approval flow

• Merit cycle insights

• Configuring a merit cycle