Giving a Raise or Promotion

One screen, one field that matters most: the effective date. Get it right and payroll handles the rest — including back pay.

The one thing to understand first

A raise isn't an edit to someone's pay — it's a new entry on their employment history timeline, with an effective date. Payroll reads whichever entry was in effect during the pay period it's calculating. That's the whole mechanism, and it's what makes raises forgivingly correct: record a raise late and the next pay run still pays the right amount from its effective date, splitting the period if the raise landed mid-cycle.

Step by step

1. Open the employee's profile, go to Employment History, and click Update Employment → Promote (for a title-and-pay change) or the general update (for pay only).
2. Set the Effective Date — the day the new pay starts. This is the field that matters; everything else follows from it.
3. Enter the new compensation, and any change to title, employment level, department, division, or manager that comes with it.
4. Save. The new entry joins the timeline; the previous one stays intact as history.

Back pay: when the raise is already overdue

If the effective date is in the past and the period it covers has not yet been paid, the next pay run simply pays at the new rate from that date — no special handling. If the period was already paid at the old rate, the shortfall is back pay: pay it with an off-cycle run (an explicit catch-up amount) or add it to the next regular run. The system won't retroactively rewrite a published run, so the gap is yours to pay forward.

Doing it for several people at once

A market adjustment or annual review cycle that raises many people is a bulk update — it writes an employment history entry for each person at the effective date you set, exactly as if you'd done them one by one. Same effective-date discipline applies.