Currently, our comp cycle functionality supports two general approaches to budgeting:
Generally speaking, you should use Reviewer-Based Budgets when you already know how much budget each reviewer should get, want Reviewers of Reviewers to control the budgets of reviewers underneath them, or both.
Comparatively, you should generally use Employee-Based Budgets when you need to dynamically calculate budgets, want reviewers’ budgets to change based on whom they are reviewing, or both.
For your organization’s budgeting calculations, please note that all salary numbers shown in comp cycles in Aeqium reflect employees’ annual salaries. If your company uploaded HRIS data on hourly employees, our system automatically annualizes that hourly rate using the following formula: Hourly Salary * 40 * 52 = Annual Salary
Aeqium defaults to having comp cycle budgets be in USD but, if you select a different currency to use as your cycle’s Base Currency, your budgets will be in that currency instead.
Reviewer-Based Budgeting facilitates top-down budget distribution across a compensation cycle. It provides administrators with the full freedom and flexibility to allocate budgets to any employees they see fit, and, if you want, for the recipients of their budget allocations to go on to allocate budgets down their management / review chain. Reviewer-Based Budgeting enables administrators and reviewers to select how far down the review chain budgets can be allocated.
If your organization wants to provide budgets to certain groups of reviewers, have budgets that don’t reflect cycle eligibility, and/or give senior reviewers control over budgets for leaders below them, then you should use Reviewer-Based Budgets in Aeqium.
Reviewer-Based Budgets do not need to be finished or even started when you create a compensation cycle. Instead, they can easily also be configured and allocated after the compensation cycle has been created.
However, it is important to note that the order of budget allocations directly follows the management / review chain specified for your compensation cycle. Aeqium users and reviewers who are not administrators can, if you’d like them to, allocate budgets exclusively to the employees they are responsible for reviewing.
Similarly, it is also important to recognize that when a review chain is altered, the values of budgets that have been allocated will not change. However, depending on the change, Aeqium may automatically create an allocation of 0 budget. This enables an individual who was previously not a reviewer, but became one mid-cycle, to see the previously allocated budgets of employees under them in the review chain. Further information on this feature is provided in the “Review Chain Changes” section of this document below.
If you have not already, please reference Aeqium’s guide to running compensation cycles as an administrator: Comp Cycles Admin Guide
The first action an administrator should take to utilize this approach in their compensation cycle is to select the “Reviewer” option under “Enable Budgets”. There are two ways to accomplish this, both of which entail using the Budget section of the compensation cycle settings modal shown below. First, administrators will see this page when they initially configure a compensation cycle. Second, administrators can return to this page at any time by navigating to “Edit Settings” in the top right of the compensation cycle user dashboard.
After selecting “Reviewer”, you can select from a list which comp cycle columns you want to create budgets for:
The list of columns available to create budgets for includes our default Salary, Bonus, Equity, and Total Cash columns (if you’ve enabled them in your cycle), as well as any custom columns you’ve created that have column-type Base Currency, Cash Increase, or Equity Award. This guide covers using custom column budgets in detail in the Custom Column Budgets section below.
Once the Reviewer-Based Budget option is chosen and you’ve selected which columns to create budgets for, an administrator can begin allocating budgets to any reviewers in their comp cycle.
After clicking “Add a Budget Recipient” and selecting a recipient, you will be able to define budget amounts for each compensation component for that recipient:
For a reviewer’s budget for a given compensation component (salary, bonus, etc), Aeqium gives you the ability to define both an overall ‘Org Budget’, as well as a partial ‘Team Budget’. Org Budgets cover adjustments for the entire org (direct and indirect reports), while Team Budgets are portions of Org Budgets. Team Budgets are for adjustments on just their direct reports.
For example, let us say that we have a cycle with only 4 reviewers. Mr. Boss is a reviewer-of-reviewers, and Reviewers A, B, & C all report to him:
Note that the actions taken in this administrator view will not be finalized until the user selects the “Save and Close” button at the bottom of the modal. After administrators save, any budget allocations they created will then appear in the recipient’s charts for budget.
In addition to manually entering budgets, admins can also import them:
Allocating / Editing Budgets - Admins can choose for Reviewers of Reviewers (RoRs) to be able, or not be able, to allocate budgets to the reviewers beneath them (or edit those already assigned). If RoRs can allocate budget, they will see and be able to use the “Your Org’s Budgets” tab in your comp cycle:
Going Over Budget - Admins can allow reviewers to submit their reviewers while being over budget, or block them from doing so.
Currently, Aeqium provides three distinct ways for administrators to monitor allocated budgets across their entire company. First, administrators can return to the budget configuration window where they initially allocated budgets, shown in the image below. The budgets table contains budgets allocated directly by administrators, as well as ones allocated by users who are not administrators (if you’ve allowed that). In addition to monitoring budgets, administrators also have the ability to edit and delete budgets on this page.
Second, administrators can see all budgets and track reviewers’ spend on the Cycle Monitor tab of comp cycles. After selecting the budget you want to view, you’ll see each reviewer’s budget and spend on the org chart.
Third, administrators can preview what a non-administrator user’s view will look like before the cycle is opened. To do so, they can select the Preview Cycle button in the top left of their compensation cycle dashboard. If you’ve enabled reviewers to allocate budgets to reviewers beneath them, you can then view the My Org’s Budgets tab to get a more in-depth look at what a specific user will see.
As mentioned above, using Reviewer-Based Budgets enables you to define budgets for any custom columns you’ve created that have column-type Base Currency, Cash Increase, or Equity Award. We cover each of these column types separately below:
Budget deletions become complicated when taking into account the hierarchical structure of a compensation cycle. As a result, there is one behavior in Aeqium that is implicit when a budget allocated to a user is deleted.
To illustrate this behavior, imagine that Director A has a budget and their direct reports, Managers B and C, have budgets. If Director A’s budget is deleted, Manager B and C’s budgets will be deleted as well. This cascading delete takes place with the intent that, by deleting a budget from someone higher up, a user is most likely indicating that the people under them will also not need to worry about budgets.
Aeqium provides confirmation modals for both admin and reviewer budget deletions to ensure a budget deletion doesn’t happen accidentally.
Review chain changes are another action that makes tracking budgets intricate. The implicit behavior here is an automatically created budget of 0 in some circumstances.
An example would be if there are Non-reviewer A without budget and Reviewer of Reviewers B with budget. If Non-Reviewer A is changed to now be the reviewer of Reviewer B’s, then Reviewer A will be allocated a budget of 0.
The purpose of this behavior is to enable Reviewer A to be able to view Reviewer B’s budget. Because reviewers who have not been allocated a budget cannot see any budgets, this behavior allows reviewers, in the event of a review chain change, to become aware of any preexisting budgeting that occurred and potentially make changes. Reviewer B’s budget will not change, nor will any budgets they allocated to their subordinates, unless an administrator or Reviewer A makes those changes explicitly.
It is important to note that, if you want to duplicate a cycle that was created before May 2023, the budgeting method you selected and budgets you assigned will not duplicate over.
If you need to get your reviewer-based budget allocations out of Aeqium and into a spreadsheet, you can easily export budgets using the “Export As” button (right above the table of budget allocations).
Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] for issues with the platform or feedback. Support channels within your company are a better choice for questions about policy or your specific cycle.