Defining who is eligible

Decide who the cycle plans before you launch it. You need the System Admin or Total Rewards Admin role, and a cycle in the Setup phase — see Creating a cycle.

A cycle plans every active employee it can, and leaves out anyone its eligibility rules exclude. The rules are the hire cutoff and the named exclusions, and they fix when the cycle launches.

Set the hire cutoff

1. Open the cycle, choose the Setup tab, and select Edit on 1. Participants.
2. Pick the Hire cutoff, the last hire date the cycle plans for.
3. Watch Hired after this cutoff. It counts who the date would leave out as you change it, and shows the difference from the cutoff you last saved.
4. Select View who and why to jump to the people the cutoff leaves out in the Who launch will skip list. Below the cutoff, that list follows the date you are editing: a person the new date adds is marked Left out by the new cutoff, and a person the saved date left out but the new date would plan for stays in the list, marked Back in with the new cutoff.
5. Select Save at the foot of the section.

Someone hired on the cutoff date itself is planned. Someone with no hire date on record is planned too, because the cutoff cannot test them. They are listed by name under the Hire cutoff field in 1. Participants, in a warning that reads n employees have no hire date, so you can decide whether to add their dates first. A cutoff later than today is flagged there too, as The hire cutoff is later than today. Both warnings follow the saved cutoff: while the field holds a date you have not saved, a note says so, and Save checks the new one. The Launch summary repeats both as lines, and their Fix scrolls to them. Clear the date to plan everyone regardless of when they started.

Name an employee to exclude

A named exclusion takes one employee out of one cycle, with a reason of up to 500 characters. In the 1. Participants section, select Exclude an employee in the header of the Who launch will skip list, choose the Employee, enter the Reason and select Exclude; Remove on the person’s row takes the exclusion away. Both save at once, and Cancel on the section does not undo them. A connected AI client whose access includes Administer cycles can add and remove them too. Only System Admins and Total Rewards Admins can read the reason. Every exclusion added or removed is recorded on the audit trail.

A named exclusion must be an active employee, and a cycle can carry up to 500. The list shows them as Excluded by your compensation team, marked Named, with your reason, who excluded them and when.

What the manager sees

An employee left out by the hire cutoff or a named exclusion appears on their manager’s worksheet as a greyed-out, read-only row with no figures, marked Hired after the cutoff or Excluded by your compensation team. The manager never sees the reason you wrote.

Who else is left out

Before launch, Who launch will skip, below the hire cutoff in the 1. Participants section, lists everyone launch will skip once. Each row shows the person’s name, the reason, the hire date and whether the exclusion is Named or Automatic, and the Launch summary beside the sections counts them. Besides Hired after the cutoff and Excluded by your compensation team, the reasons are:

• Terminated
• No base pay on record
• No manager on record
• Outside this cycle’s department scope
• Manager not in the directory
• No participating manager above them — see Inviting participants

The rules fix at launch

Eligibility is worked out once, when the cycle launches. After that, the hire cutoff and the named exclusions can no longer be changed: the 1. Participants section is marked Frozen at launch, and View opens it read-only. After launch the list shows the named exclusions alone, without Remove, under the note that it was fixed at launch. An employee the rules left out stays out of that cycle.