To navigate budgets and this guide effectively, you will need to know whether or not you are a Reviewer of Reviewers. If you are not, you only need to read the Budgets for Your Reviews portion of this guide and can skip ahead to it now.
If you are a Reviewer of Reviewers, you will also need to know which Budget Distribution Method (Reviewer-Based Budgets, Employee-Based Budgets) your company’s admins have selected.
Fortunately, we’ve made that very easy to figure out. You don’t even need to ask your admins (although that is always an option)! Simply navigate to your comp cycle dashboard and check if you have a tab for “My Org’s Budgets”.
As a reviewer, the types of budgets you will see depend on how your company set up its comp cycle. You could be asked to use budgets for Salary, Total Cash, Bonus, or Equity. You may also have budgets for individual components of those overall budgets. These budgets may be specified as a percentage increase based on current spend, a total amount of new spend, or custom budgets for each employee you are asked to review.
Here we see what a Reviewer of Reviewers would see for a comp cycle with Employee-Based Budgets. A standard reviewer would essentially see this same page, but with exclusively the “Only My Directs” tab, regardless of budget distribution method.
In either or both of the “All My Employees” and the “Only My Directs” tabs of the user comp cycle dashboard, you will be able to see aggregate spend against your budgets when you enter new Salary, Total Cash or Bonus values for employees. Depending on how your admins configured your cycle’s budgets, your budget and budget spend may update based the employees you are currently viewing (ex: using filters).
If you are a Reviewer of Reviewers with an allocated budget in the “My Org’s Budgets” tab, then you can further allocate budgets. In the budgets tab, you will be able to see the amount of budget you’ve been allocated, the different budget types (Salary, Bonus, etc), and to whom you can further allocate budgets among your direct reports.
Budgets are broken up by compensation type for reviewers. Each card in the tab represents a different compensation type and is labeled accordingly. Additionally, you can only edit one budget type at a time.
Reviewers of Reviewers also have what is called a “Reserve Budget” which is budget specifically allocated, or reserved, for their own team.
An example use case for the reserve budget would be if a Vice President is allocated a budget from an administrator and then needs to further allocate that budget to the Directors under them in the review chain. The budget allocated to the directors is to be spent on their team but not themselves. As such, the budget that the Directors’ own compensation comes out of is the Vice President’s Reserve Budget. It is the piece of the budget allocated to the VP that takes into account the changes in total spend for their direct reports.