Compensation Band & Range Checker

The problem this kills

A recruiter is about to extend an offer. A manager wants to give someone a raise. The question that should take ten seconds — is this number inside the band for that role and location? — somehow takes twenty minutes. Someone opens the comp-structure spreadsheet, hunts for the right job, double-checks they're looking at the correct level and the correct geo, eyeballs whether the proposed salary sits between min and max, and tries to remember how to compute a compa-ratio. Multiply that by every offer and every merit cycle and you get inconsistency, quiet exceptions that never got approved, and a comp philosophy that exists on paper but not in practice.

Worse, the out-of-band cases — the ones that should trigger a conversation — often slip through because there's no gate. A salary lands above max, nobody documents why, and six months later nobody can explain the pay decision to an auditor, a leader, or the employee sitting next to them.

What you'll build

A small, private web app that makes the band check instant and the exceptions impossible to skip:

• Load your compensation structure — bands by job/level/location, each with min, mid, and max.
• Check a proposed salary against the right band for the role: enter the role, level, location, and number, and get back position-in-range, compa-ratio, and which quartile it lands in.
• Verdict in plain language — in-band (and where), below min, or above max.
• Gate the exceptions — anything out of band can't just proceed; it's routed for explicit approval with a documented reason.
• Export an audited CSV of every check you ran, with the verdict and approval status.

The tool informs the decision; a person makes it. It never writes to your HRIS or payroll — it reads your band table and produces a clean record.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent. The very first thing it does is interview you about your business — how your bands are structured, whether you run location/geo differentials, how your levels map to titles, the exact column names in your comp spreadsheet, and the messy cases (dual job titles, new roles with no band yet, hourly vs. salaried). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the tool fits your real structure — not a generic template.

From there it walks you, step by step, through:

• Standing up the Next.js app, Supabase database, and login.
• Designing the data model around your band structure and level/location scheme.
• Importing the comp-structure table (with a duplicate guard so the same band can't load twice).
• Building the check screen that computes position-in-range, compa-ratio, and quartile.
• The out-of-band approval gate, with a documented reason and an emailed approval request.
• The audited CSV export of every check.

Every build step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt you paste into your agent.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a throwaway calculator — it's a pay-decision control, so it's built like one:

• Login so only your HR and comp team can open it — pay data stays internal.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own bands and checks.
• A complete audit trail — who checked what salary against which band, what the verdict was, and who approved any exception, all timestamped.
• A human-in-the-loop gate — out-of-band proposals can't proceed until a person approves them with a written reason. The tool drafts; a person decides.
• Duplicate guards so the same check (same employee/candidate + role + date) can't be logged twice.

Who it's for

HR business partners, recruiters, and managers who make offer and raise decisions and need a fast, consistent band check they can trust — and a comp or HR lead who wants every out-of-band exception documented and approved instead of quietly slipping through. If you can describe your band structure and pull a spreadsheet of it, you can build this — no developer required.

You've got this. Open the Implementation Plan, paste the first prompt, and let the agent interview you.