Compensation Enhancements to Streamline Your Budgeting and Planning Season

Budgeting season is here, and whether you tie your compensation plan to your performance plans or not, your organization is probably thinking hard about compensation. Between inflation, pay equity, and employee retention, compensation planning can create some challenges. Many organizations are beginning to budget for higher pay raises than in previous years and may not stick to what they set in their budget to account for the tight labor market. Having a tool to help your organization through those pay raises and budgeting guidelines can help to reduce the headache of calculating all of those numbers. Over the past three releases, our product team has introduced 12 new compensation and budgeting enhancements. Let’s explore how some of those enhancements can help you stay in line during your compensation season.

Compensation Cycles

If your compensation cycle is consistent year after year, the copy comp cycle (R80) feature will help save you time when creating new comp cycles. The copy feature brings over all the existing configuration from the cloned cycle but still allows you to make adjustments before beginning the cycle. 

And with new date features to ensure only the employees who need to be included in the compensation cycle will be there, you don’t have to worry about noneligible employees accidentally landing on the worksheet. The Eligibility Period Days Since (R81) option now includes more flexibility for narrowing down the eligible employees beyond just the hire date, as it now also includes other date fields configured in your system. Not only can you choose your eligibility periods with more options, but you can also set a Freeze As Of date (R81), which will stop pulling employees into the compensation cycle as of the date set. So, if you want to align the eligibility period and the freeze date, those can now be set to function together. 

Enhancements are bolded and indicate which release cycle they are from.

Merit Matrices and Worksheets

To simplify the process of adding increases to your employees, you can utilize a Single Value Merit Matrix (R81) option when creating a new merit matrix. When using the performance review functionality, the single value matrix allows you to enter a single value in each of the ratings on the matrix. So instead of selecting an increase amount from a range of values, you can have a set amount given based on the rating. Then those increases can be automatically populated (R82) on the manager’s worksheet when the performance rating value is generated at the Send Score or Finalized step in the Performance Review or at the time of the Compensation Cycle creation. And no worries if you have some one-off situations where the auto-populated value doesn’t match the value you intend to give to an employee because the auto-populated amount will be editable. 

Budget Tools

Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for — the “how can I use these functions to help budget my employees’ pay” question. As managers dive into their worksheets, they will need budgeting standards to ensure they aren’t going too far over (or under) budget and align to the overall budget. New validations (R80) have been put in place so that your managers will not be able to exceed the budget, they will receive an error message if they try do so, and the fields needing attention will be highlighted (R81). On the flip side, if the checkbox is enabled, managers will be able to exceed the budget, if needed. 

Additionally, when budgeting, it is crucial to see the amounts in an overall view and ensure those amounts appear correctly. Rounding (R80) of those amounts due to percentage increases can be a cause of headaches, so the system will now calculate the percentages to the fourth decimal place, but it will display the amount rounded to the second decimal place. This helps make the proposed budget amount closer to where you want the budget to be when using a dollar amount to set the budget versus the percentage. It is also important that the budgets are reflected throughout the organizational hierarchy (R80). As changes are made and increase amounts are set, these changes are reflected in all upper-level manager’s Comparative Budget Assigned and the Manager’s Organization Budget widgets. 

Reviewing and Approving

Knowing when worksheets are ready to be reviewed and approved can sometimes be tricky, but now there is a new notification (R80) that can be sent right to the approvers. The notification is sent when a worksheet has no more entries available based on either the Compensation Cycle Close Date or if there are no entries in a status other than pending. Now approvals can take place in a timely manner. 

When hiring, job changes, transfers, and promotions are constant, calculating the compensation amounts based on a proration can be difficult. But with the new prorated visibility (R80) feature, managers and approvers can now view the prorated amounts and percentages in the To Do items, making it easy for managers to view those prorated amounts in a pop-up when modifying, approving, or finalizing the proposal. 

Where to Learn More

UKG Ready® — Learning Center
The Learning Center offers a learning journey to get you started. The onboarding learning journey includes two self-paced courses and an instructor-led training to help guide you through using the functionality. Additionally, there are several job aids available that can help assist you through the Compensation module configuration and troubleshooting. Access the Learning Center through your UKG Ready account by navigating to My Info> Help> Learning Center. 

All the feature enhancements in this blog were from the April, June, and August releases. Explore the Release Readiness page for spotlight videos and release highlights from the most recent release. Review the release notes for more information. You can also dive into the Compensation Management User Guide. Both the guide and release notes can be found in the Online Documentation in your solution under My Info> Help> Online Documentation. 

UKG Dimensions® HCM — UKG University
Check out the UKG University live instructor-led course, Administrator Tasks and Outcomes: Dimensions HCM Compensation for a deeper dive into the Compensation module. Prerequisites for the instructor-led course are available in the UKG KnowledgeMap and include Project Team Fundamentals: Compensation and Administrator Tasks & Outcomes: Compensation.

All of the feature enhancements in this blog were from the April, June, and August releases. Explore the Release Readiness page for spotlight videos and release highlights from the most recent release. Review the release notes for more information.