Nothing in a salary review cycle is committed while the cycle is open. Decisions can be revisited, amounts recalibrated, settings changed. That ends when an Owner locks the cycle: the approved changes leave Salary Reviews and become real changes to people's contracts.
This article explains what to check before you lock, what locking does, and the step that still has to happen afterwards before anyone is actually paid more.
Before you lock
Locking can't be undone, so it's worth a last pass. Check that:
- Every proposal has been decided. Anything still undecided when you lock goes nowhere.
- The totals are what you expected. Nothing has enforced the budget up to this point, so this is the last moment to notice an overspend.
- Calibrated amounts are the ones you meant. What gets applied is the final figure on the row, not what the manager originally proposed.
- The effective date is right. It applies to the whole cycle, so a wrong date is wrong for everyone in it.
- Your approvers are actually finished. Nothing tells you they are — ask them.
Locking the cycle
Only an Owner can lock a cycle, using Lock cycle. Deciding the last proposal doesn't do it; a fully decided cycle will sit in Under review indefinitely until someone locks it.
Locking moves the cycle to Closed and applies every approved change.
Lock cycle can't be undone. A closed cycle can't be reopened and nothing inside it can be edited. From that point, a change is corrected in the employee's contract, not here.
What happens to an approved change
Each approved proposal becomes a change to that employee's contract, carrying the cycle's effective date. Nobody retypes anything, and there's no export step in between.
The change also appears as an update in Compensation, exactly as contract updates and promotions recorded by hand do today — so the person's pay history reads as one continuous record rather than showing a gap where the review happened.
Rejected proposals do nothing. They stay in the cycle as part of its record, but nothing reaches the employee or their contract.
What still needs doing
Locking writes the change into the employee's contract inside Factorial. Two things don't happen on their own:
- The signed document. A contract update from a cycle doesn't produce a document for the employee to sign. If your process needs one, handle it as you would for any other contract change.
- The payslip. The change doesn't update payroll. Make sure it reaches whoever runs your payslips in time for the effective date.
The effective date
The effective date belongs to the cycle, not to individual people. Every approved change in the cycle takes effect on the same day.
Set the effective date to reflect when the raises should actually begin, not when you expect to finish deciding. The two are rarely the same, and the date is the thing everyone will be asked about afterwards.
What's not included
Base salary only. A salary review cycle changes base pay. Bonuses, supplements and variable pay aren't part of it — those live in Compensation and are managed there.
No export from the cycle itself. Closing a cycle doesn't produce a file. The approved changes are collected in Compensation, where they're handled like any other pay change.
What the employee sees
Nothing of the cycle. Not the proposal, not the justification, not the comments, not who decided what.
They see the result: an updated contract with its effective date, like any other contract change.
The system won't tell anyone they've had a raise. Plan how that conversation happens — the contract appearing is not the announcement.
Fixing a mistake after locking
A closed cycle can't be reopened, so a change applied by mistake is corrected where it now lives: in the employee's contract.
That correction is a normal contract change. It won't appear in the cycle, and the cycle's record will still show what was originally approved — which is the right outcome for an audit trail, even though it means the two no longer match.
Best practices
- Lock deliberately, not as housekeeping. It's the one irreversible action in the whole cycle.
- Agree the effective date before the cycle opens. Changing it late means re-explaining it to everyone who already heard the old one.
- Finish the job in Compensation. Locking the cycle feels like the end of the work. It isn't — the updates sit at Not sent until someone sends them.
- Tell managers when you've locked. They won't be notified, and until you do they can't safely talk to their teams.
- Don't lock a cycle with undecided proposals in it. Those people get nothing, and nothing flags that they were missed.
- Keep the pay conversation out of the product. The contract update is the record, not the message.