Launching a cycle

Launch the cycle to open planning to your managers. You need the System Admin or Total Rewards Admin role, and a configured cycle whose Launch summary reads Ready to launch — see Verifying everything before launch.

Launching cannot be undone. Read the confirmation before you confirm.

Launch it

1. Open the cycle and choose the Setup tab. The cycle must be in the Setup phase.
2. Wait until the Launch summary reads Ready to launch, then select Launch cycle, at the foot of the Launch summary beside the sections.
3. Read the confirmation:
   • The verdict, Ready to launch, with its count of warnings, and the same lines the Launch summary showed: each warning, then what launch will do (the welcome emails it will send and the people it excludes). They are the summary’s lines without the links, because Launch cycle is switched off while the summary reads Launch is blocked, so the dialog only opens on a cycle that can launch.
   • What’s included in this cycle? — one worksheet per planning manager, one recommendation per eligible employee, a budget for every funded pool, and the guidance the merit matrix gives.
   • Before you launch — each employee’s pay band is resolved and fixed now, and cannot be filled in later, and launching cannot be undone.
4. Select Launch cycle.

A message then counts the worksheets and recommendations launch created, and anyone it skipped.

What launching does

• It creates the plan. Every planning manager gets a worksheet, every eligible employee a recommendation, and every manager a budget from each funded pool.
• It opens planning. The cycle moves to the Planning phase with the status Active, and managers can see it for the first time. Each worksheet owner gets a notification that planning is open, due by the end of the Planning phase.
• It welcomes the staged. Every staged participant in the workspace who is not a System Admin is sent a welcome email, unless their welcome is held. Managers with a worksheet who were invited but have not signed in yet get a fresh welcome that says planning is open, with a new link that replaces the one they had. See Inviting participants.
• It fixes the rules. Eligibility, the funding of each pool, the timeline, the pay effective date, the currency and the planning basis can no longer be changed, and each employee’s pay band is taken as it stands. The guardrails and the pools’ soft and hard limits are not fixed: you can change them until the cycle is finalized or cancelled, and a change that would send worksheets back asks you first.
• It is recorded on the audit trail, with who launched it and when. The entry also records how many employees overlapped another active cycle and which cycles those were, as launch found them at that moment.

After launch

The cycle’s primary action becomes Advance to Approval, and its Worksheets tab, no longer greyed out, shows the cycle’s progress. From here, see Tracking timeline progress. Guardrails and pool limits stay editable on Setup, with the funding on 2. Budget switched off. What you can still change, and what a change to a limit does to the worksheets already in, is in Changing a cycle after launch.