Merit Increase Recommendation and Approval Tool

The problem (your words)

A merit-increase recommendation tool for people managers. At review time it pulls each employee's current salary, latest performance rating, time in role, and their position within their pay band, then suggests a recommended raise percentage and new salary, flags out-of-band proposals, lets managers adjust within guardrails, and routes proposals to HR and Finance for approval.

The solution

Build a manager-facing merit increase tool that reads employee compensation inputs from the HRIS and pay-band spreadsheet, calculates a recommended raise percentage and resulting new salary, shows band position and policy flags, allows manager edits within defined guardrails, and routes proposals to HR/comp and Finance for approval with a complete audit trail. For v1, keep it focused on one merit cycle, read-only imports from source systems, manual final upload back to the HRIS, and configurable recommendation logic. Out of scope for v1: direct write-back to the HRIS, automated final approvals, bonus/equity planning, broad pay-equity analytics, and any automatic pay changes without human sign-off.