Compensation reviews and ESOP vesting your employees can actually see

Companies where compensation currently lives in a spreadsheet on a founder’s or finance lead’s machine, and where the quarterly "how much have I vested?" question arrives by email. The buyer is usually finance or the founder rather than HR. It is worth having once you have more than a handful of grades, more than one location paying different bands, or an ESOP pool with a vesting schedule someone has to track. A five-person company with one pay band and no equity does not need it.

Yes, that is the point of the module. Each person sees their own grants, their vesting schedule, their vested and unvested units and their next vest date in self-service, without a request and without anyone assembling a statement. It is shown in units rather than a valuation, because a valuation is a number we would be making up. Nobody sees anybody else’s position: seeing an amount requires compensation clearance, which is a separate permission from being able to administer the module.

A paid plan first, because paid modules cannot be enabled on the free plan. Then the setup is genuinely front-loaded, more than most modules here. You define your compensation component types (fixed, allowance, variable target), your bands by grade or designation and location with their own effective dates and currency, your revision approval chain on the core workflow engine, and your revision and grant letter templates. Then you load the current compensation record for each person, which has no importer and is entered by hand, and your ESOP plans and grants. Grades and designations have to exist in the core org structure first, because bands hang off them. Expect this to be a project rather than an afternoon.

It is not a cap-table product and does not replace your cap-table source of truth: grants reference the legal register rather than becoming it. It shows units, not value, so there is no valuation display, no tax advice and no perquisite valuation. It computes no pay: components and variable-pay targets are recorded as structured data that becomes payroll input, and nothing is calculated into pay here. It moves no money on an option exercise; exercise, lapse and cancellation are recorded events. And module access is not permission to see salaries: seeing an amount needs compensation clearance, administering the module is a separate capability, and holding one never grants the other.

It rests on the core’s field-level security, which is what lets a salary be stored as an encrypted, effective-dated record that most of the workspace cannot read. Bands hang off the core’s grades, designations and locations, revision approvals run on the core workflow engine, and an approved revision generates and files its letter through the core letters machinery. A transfer recorded in the core can trigger a band re-evaluation. Downstream, compensation records are inputs the Payroll module compiles and hands to your payroll partner, which is the only place a number here turns into a payment, and it is your partner who computes that. Performance ratings can be read by someone with compensation clearance while they prepare a revision, and nothing automates the step from one to the other.

Compensation records, bands, revision workflows and the equity views stop being reachable, including the self-service vesting screen your employees use, and billing stops at the end of the current period rather than on the day. The data is not deleted: it is retained on a schedule, and re-enabling within that window restores it, including the full effective-dated history rather than only current values. A full workspace export includes module data whether or not the module is currently enabled, and sensitive values come out of that export decrypted under your own authority. Letters already generated and filed against a person remain documents in the core document store.