If you use Performance, a salary review cycle can read it. Each person in the cycle shows whether they're eligible for an increase under your guidelines, and a manager can open the full review behind that verdict without leaving the sheet.
This article explains what the connection shows, how eligibility is worked out, and what the connection deliberately doesn't do.
What the connection does
Without it, a manager proposing a raise has a salary, a range and their own memory of the year. The evidence lives in another module, and in practice nobody opens it mid-cycle.
With it, the review result travels to the point of decision. The manager sees it beside the increase field, the approver sees the same thing when deciding, and the reasoning behind a raise stops depending on who remembers what.
What you see, and where
Each person in the cycle carries a verdict — the answer to "does this person qualify for an increase under our rules?"
- Eligible — they meet the guidelines.
- Not eligible — they don't, with the reason shown alongside.
- Not judged — the guidelines couldn't be applied because information is missing. If your rules look at someone's last three performance reviews and they only have two, there's nothing to judge them against.
Open the side panel on a row to see the full review information behind the verdict before you decide.
The cycle shows a verdict, not a score. You see whether someone qualifies and why — not a rating printed next to their salary. The detail is a click away in the side panel for the people who need it.
How eligibility is decided
Eligibility comes from your guidelines, not from Factorial's opinion of anyone. You write the rules when you set up the cycle — a performance threshold, a tenure condition, a merit range — and every person in the cycle is measured against them.
Change the guidelines and the verdicts change with them. Ask One for fresh suggestions afterwards, since the existing ones were built against the old rules.
What it doesn't do
Performance data informs the decision. It doesn't make it. There's no merit matrix — nothing converts a rating into a suggested percentage, and no increase is calculated from a performance band. One suggests amounts from your guidelines and your budget; a person decides what's actually proposed.
Nor does a verdict gate anything. A manager can propose for someone marked Not eligible or Not judged, and an approver can approve it. The verdict exists to make an exception a deliberate choice rather than an accident.
What you need for this to work
- Performance in use, with completed review results for the people in the cycle.
- Guidelines that reference them. The connection does nothing on its own — it's your rules that put performance to work. Guidelines that say nothing about performance produce verdicts that say nothing about performance.
- Enough history for the rules you've written. A rule that looks at three reviews needs three reviews.
You choose which reviews count
Factorial doesn't decide which performance results are relevant — your guidelines do. Say which reviews the cycle should read and over what period, and that's what every verdict is based on.
That makes the rule worth stating precisely. "The last two review cycles" and "any review in the past 18 months" will include different results, and they'll produce different verdicts for the same people.
Be careful what you ask for. The wider the history your rules reach back over, the more people will have enough of it to be judged — but the more weight you give to results that may no longer reflect the person.
If you don't use Performance
Cycles still run. Managers propose, approvers decide, approved changes reach contracts the same way. What's missing is the evidence column: eligibility can still be driven by whatever else your guidelines reference, but nothing carries review results to the decision.
Best practices
- Run the eligibility preview before the cycle opens. It tells you whether your rules can actually be applied to your people. A preview full of Not judged means the guidelines are asking for data you don't hold.
- Write guidelines that name what you'll look at. "Strong performers" isn't a rule. A named threshold over a named number of reviews is.
- Open the side panel before calibrating. A number that looks generous often has a review behind it that explains why.
- Don't treat Not judged as a no. It's usually missing data, not an undeserving person.
- Sequence the two cycles. Run the performance cycle first and let results land before the salary review opens. A comp cycle that opens mid-review has nothing to read.