Compensation Module

The Compensation module covers salary bands, compensation review cycles, comp change requests, equity, and pay-equity analysis.

Overview

The Compensation module provides:

  • Salary Bands — define pay ranges by role/level, with a Sparko global band catalog to subscribe from
  • Merit Cycles — company-wide compensation review cycles with recommendations and approval
  • Comp Change Requests — one-off adjustments outside a cycle, with configurable multi-level approval
  • Total Rewards — a rollup of base, bonus, and equity on the employee profile
  • Pay Equity — ethnicity pay-gap analysis and a UK Gender Pay Gap report
  • Equity — grants and vesting (see known limitations below — this area has open bugs)

Salary Bands

Navigate to Compensation > Bands to view and manage salary bands. Each band defines a min/mid/max range for a role and level.

Sparko global band catalog: rather than building bands from scratch, browse Sparko's market-benchmark catalog, subscribe to a band to track it, or replicate it as your own tenant-owned band you can then edit freely.

Merit Cycles

Navigate to Compensation > Cycles to run a company-wide compensation review.

  1. Create a cycle and set its budget envelope.
  2. Assign employees to salary bands if they aren't already.
  3. Managers submit merit recommendations for their reports.
  4. Recommendations are approved or rejected against the cycle.
  5. Approved changes apply to employee compensation.

A budget tab on the cycle shows spend as recommendations come in; per-department budget allocation surfaces only once recommendations have been aggregated — there isn't yet a standalone budget-planning tool you can build an allocation in ahead of a cycle.

Merit Review Worksheet

Managers work a cycle on the merit review worksheet, a grid of their team with one row per report, at /compensation/reviews/{cycleId}/worksheet. Each row shows the person's current salary, where that salary sits in its band (below, in-band, above midpoint, or above band), their latest review rating from the cycle, and an input for a merit percent or flat amount. As you type, Sparko fills in the new salary and the budget burn bar updates against the envelope HR set for the cycle.

  • A manager sees only their own reporting subtree. The worksheet rejects any edit to someone outside it.
  • Editing the worksheet stages recommendations only. It writes to the cycle's recommendation list, never to live pay. Actual salary changes still go through cycle approval and apply afterward.
  • HR (with compensation.merit.create) sets and adjusts the cycle budget envelope. Managers propose against it but cannot change it.

Bulk edit by CSV. On a large team, click Export to download the current rows, edit the merit percent column in a spreadsheet, then upload it back. Before you commit, Sparko shows a dry-run diff: which rows it would add, update, leave unchanged, or skip (already-approved rows), with a warning on any new salary that lands over the band max. Apply writes the changes to staging in one pass. Rows outside your scope or with no compensation on file are reported as errors rather than applied.

Outcome Letters

Once a raise is approved and applied, generate the employee's compensation outcome letter from the worksheet. Sparko fills a letter template with the person's outcome (new salary, effective date, and the like) and lists the generated letters for the cycle so you can review before sending.

  • Templates are managed by HR (compensation.merit.create). The merge fields a template can use are validated against an allowlist, so a template cannot pull in fields it should not.
  • Generating and sending letters is scoped to your team the same way the worksheet is. Generate one letter at a time from an approved change, or generate for the whole cycle to draft a letter for every approved raise in your scope at once.
  • A letter can be AI-assisted (Sparko drafts the wording) or template-only. Send freezes the letter as sent and delivers it to the employee. A sent letter is a permanent record.

Comp Change Requests

For adjustments outside a merit cycle (e.g. a promotion, a market adjustment), submit a Comp Change Request.

  • Requests move through submit → advance → approve/reject → apply (or can be withdrawn before a decision).
  • The approval chain is frozen as a snapshot at submission time, so a later reporting-line change doesn't retroactively change who was supposed to approve it.
  • Configurable approval policy: your admin sets 1–5 approval levels, whether to use the full reporting chain, whether VP-and-above changes require CEO/CFO sign-off, and designated HR/Finance approvers.

Compensation Anomaly Inbox

Sparko scores every active employee nightly against four pay-anomaly signals — low compa-ratio, level mismatch, peer gap, and long tenure without a comp change (a fifth, in-demand-skills, is coming) — and surfaces the ones that need attention as a "Needs your attention" inbox. It appears in two places:

  • Compensation > Dashboard — company-wide for HR admins, your reporting subtree if you're a manager.
  • My Team > Compensation tab — pre-filtered to your team.

Each anomaly shows the employee, the signal, and a short factual reason (for example the compa-ratio against the band midpoint). Take action offers three acknowledgements, all recorded with your name, timestamp, and optional note in the compensation audit trail:

  • Defer until year-end review — hidden until December 31, when it re-surfaces for year-end review with its latest nightly scoring.
  • Remind me later — snoozed for 30 days, then re-surfaces with its latest nightly scoring.
  • Dismiss — hides it from the inbox permanently; the nightly engine won't re-open a dismissed signal.

The open-anomalies count on the dashboard stat tile matches what's in your inbox at your visibility scope.

Pay Transparency

Your admin sets a company-wide compensation transparency tier controlling what employees can see about their own pay: off, band name/level only, numeric range (min/mid/max), or full position-in-range. This is enforced on the employee's own compensation view.

Total Rewards

Each employee's profile includes a Total Rewards view that rolls base salary, bonus, and equity value into one picture. Open the employee's Compensation tab to see it. A Print statement button on the Total Rewards card opens a clean, printable Total Rewards statement covering cash and equity, which the employee or HR can print or save as a PDF from the browser.

Compensation access history

Compensation figures are among the most sensitive data in Sparko, so every time someone decrypts an employee's pay values Sparko records who looked, at which fields, and when. This read log surfaces in two places:

  • For the employee: an Access history card on your own profile's Compensation tab shows a plain-language log of who viewed your compensation data (for example "Compensation details viewed," "Bank details viewed," or "Payroll export"), with the date. If no one has viewed it recently, it says so.
  • For HR: anyone with company-wide compensation access can pull the same access log for a given employee. This supports data-access requests (GDPR Article 15) and periodic access reviews.

This log is a record of who read pay data, not who changed it. Edits to compensation are tracked separately in the compensation audit trail.

Pay Equity

Open Pay Equity from the Compensation Hub, or from the "More people analytics" cards on People Analytics (the page lives at /analytics/pay-equity). It gives you:

  • Ethnicity pay gap — median pay comparison across ethnicity groups.
  • UK Gender Pay Gap report — formatted for the UK's statutory reporting fields (median/mean hourly pay gap, quartile pay bands).

Known limitation: the UK report's quartile pay-band breakdown isn't fully implemented yet (it currently returns placeholder values), and there's no bonus-gap metric. Don't submit this as a finished statutory UK GPG filing without checking the quartile numbers by hand.

Equity

Navigate to Compensation > Equity to view and grant equity.

  • Portfolio stats — employees with equity, outstanding fair value, percent vested, and grants made this year, all computed from your active grants.
  • Active grants table — each grant's type (ISO/NSO/RSU and legacy option types), shares, fair value, vesting progress, and schedule. Click a row for the full grant summary including the tranche-by-tranche vesting schedule.
  • Vesting milestones rail — upcoming vest events over the next 180 days, with a 30-day value/headcount summary, derived from each grant's vesting schedule and fair market value.
  • Grant equity — pick the employee, grant type, shares, and per-share fair value; choose one of the vesting templates your admin manages under Admin Settings (with an optional cliff override) and a vesting start date.

Known limitation: there's no way to cancel an equity grant from the UI yet — ask your Sparko contact if you need a grant cancelled.

Payroll Run (pay + bank export)

Sparko doesn't run statutory payroll (no tax, CPF/social contributions, or deductions). It does produce a Payroll Run — a per-period export of each employee's gross pay plus their bank payment instructions that you hand to your own bank or accountant.

Find it under Compensation › Payroll Run (HR Admin only).

  • Gross pay = base pay for the period ÷ pay frequency + recurring pay components (allowances, pension, gratuity — set per employee on their Compensation tab) + any bonuses paid in the period.
  • Each run reviews the changes since last period: joiners, leavers, compensation changes, and anyone missing verified bank details.
  • Bank details live on each employee's profile (Personal Info). Employees enter their own; an HR Admin verifies them. A run only pays verified accounts.
  • Paying entities (the legal employer that pays each employee) are managed under Admin › Compensation › Payroll. Each run groups pay and bank files per entity and currency.
  • Download the files as CSV, SG GIRO, ACH/NACHA, or SEPA (pain.001). Finalizing a run freezes it so re-downloads are identical.

Known Limitations (summary)

  • No bulk import for compensation data (salary, equity, bonus history) — enter it one employee at a time for now. (Pay + bank data export is available via the Payroll Run above.)
  • No standalone Compensation Planning / budget-allocation page — budget visibility is a tab inside each merit cycle.
  • Equity grants can't be cancelled from the UI yet.
  • The Payroll Run is a pay + bank extract, not a payslip — it does not compute tax, CPF/social contributions, or deductions.

Related guides

Still need help? Reach us at support@sparko.app.

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