Merit Increase Cycle Planner

The problem this kills

Every year the same fire drill. HR ships out a giant shared spreadsheet, managers type proposed raises into it, formulas break the moment someone inserts a row, two people edit the same tab at once, and the budget pool blows past its limit before anyone notices. Then comp spends a week reconciling: who proposed what, why is this person getting 9% when the band tops out at 6%, did the VP actually approve this, and how do we hand a clean file to payroll without fat-fingering an employee ID?

Merit cycles are high-stakes and unforgiving. A raise that lands an employee above the top of their pay band is a compliance headache. A pool that overspends by a few points across hundreds of employees is a real budget hole. And a manager who can see everyone else's salary because the spreadsheet had no real permissions is a serious confidentiality breach.

This tool replaces the breakable mega-spreadsheet with a real planning workflow: each manager gets a private worksheet with smart starting suggestions, a live budget meter that won't let them overspend their pool, band ceilings enforced in code, and a hard approval gate before a single number reaches payroll.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your HR team and managers, that:

• Loads your employee roster (current pay, performance rating, comp band, position-in-range) plus your merit-budget pool and increase guidelines from CSV or a Google Sheet.
• Generates a per-manager worksheet - each manager sees only their own reports - with a suggested increase for each person, computed from your guidelines (suggested % by rating and position-in-range).
• Shows a live budget meter: how much of the manager's pool is spent, how much remains, updating as they adjust numbers.
• Lets managers propose an increase per employee, with a reason note, while the tool validates every proposal against budget and band ceilings as they type.
• Blocks or flags anything over budget or out of band - an out-of-range raise can't just be saved; it's stopped or routed for an explicit exception/escalation.
• Routes completed worksheets to HR/finance for approval, who review against the pool and guardrails before anything is final.
• Handles proration and effective dates for mid-year hires and partial-period changes.
• Dedupes on employee ID + cycle so each employee gets exactly one merit change per cycle.
• Exports the approved changes as a payroll/HRIS-ready CSV, plus a complete audit log of who proposed, reviewed, and approved each change.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how your merit cycle runs today, what your roster columns and band structure actually look like, your real guidelines (the suggested-% grid by rating and position-in-range), the exact budget rules, how proration and effective dates work for you, and your messiest edge cases (mid-cycle hires, promotions, leaves, equity adjustments, manager changes). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your comp process, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model and the suggestion math.
• The full build: database, login, roster + budget + guidelines import with a duplicate guard, the suggestion engine, per-manager worksheets with the live budget meter and band validations, the HR/finance approval flow, and the payroll export.
• The hard human approval gate, the budget-pool and band-ceiling enforcement, and the one-change-per-employee-per-cycle rule.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-in / CSV-out fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your HRIS.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a comp team actually needs:

• Login so only your HR team and managers can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so each manager sees only their own reports' pay and proposals - never the whole company, never peers' salaries.
• A complete audit trail - every suggestion, proposal, edit, validation block, review, approval, and rejection is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI suggests and validates, but HR/finance must review and approve; nothing reaches payroll automatically.
• Budget-pool and band ceilings enforced in code - an over-budget or out-of-band proposal physically cannot be finalized without an explicit, logged exception.
• A duplicate guard on employee ID + cycle so the same person can't get two merit changes in one cycle.

Who it's for

HR and comp leaders, comp analysts, HRBPs, and the managers who run the annual merit cycle - especially anyone whose cycle currently lives in a shared spreadsheet that breaks, leaks salaries, and blows the budget. You don't need to write code. You need your roster, your budget pool, your guidelines, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.