A salary review cycle holds the most sensitive data in Factorial, so who sees what matters as much as who does what. Roles are assigned per cycle: being a Manager in one cycle gives you nothing in the next one.
The four roles
| Role | What they can do | Who they see |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Set up the cycle and change any of its settings, assign roles, ask One for suggestions, lock the cycle, delete it | Everyone in the cycle |
| Approver | Calibrate an amount, then approve or reject — individually or in bulk | The reporting lines they cover |
| Manager | Create and edit proposals, write justifications, leave comments | The people reporting to them |
| Viewer | Read the cycle and its proposals. Change nothing | The reporting lines in their line |
Whoever creates the cycle becomes an Owner automatically. You can add more Owners, and you'll want at least two — only an Owner can lock a cycle, so a single Owner on holiday is a cycle that can't be closed.
How scope works
Everyone except the Owner sees a slice of the cycle, not the whole of it. A Manager sees the people who report to them. An Approver sees the lines they were given. Outside that slice, people simply aren't there — not their names, not their proposals, not their pay.
There's one sheet underneath, not a copy per person. Everyone with permission to see a given reporting line sees the same rows, so a manager's edit is what their approver reads, with no version drift between them.
This is why a cycle's roles need to match your actual reporting structure. If someone's manager is wrong in Factorial, the proposal for them will land with the wrong person.
Holding more than one role
One person can hold several roles in the same cycle. It's the normal case for a department head: Manager for their own direct reports, Approver for the teams below them.
Before you assign a role: check two permissions
A cycle role doesn't grant access to pay data on its own. It works the other way round — the role lets someone act on a cycle, and their existing Factorial permissions decide what they can see inside it.
So before you assign anyone, check they have both of these.
Salary visibility for their scope
- A Manager needs it for their own team.
- An Approver or Owner needs it for the whole company.
Without it, they can't do the job you've given them — they won't be able to propose, decide, or get suggestions for the people in their scope.
See job catalog salary ranges
This permission is what lets someone see where a person sits in their salary range, rather than just their number in isolation.
Without it, someone has partial visibility. They can see a salary but not the range it belongs to — so they're deciding an increase without knowing whether the person is at the bottom of their band or already above it. Grant both permissions together.
Admins see everything. An administrator has full visibility across Factorial, so they can see any cycle and everything in it, whatever roles have been assigned.
What One can see
One works within your permissions. When you ask it for suggestions, it can only read and act on what you could read and act on yourself — so an Owner's suggestions cover the whole cycle, and nobody gets to see more through the agent than they would through the sheet.
When people move mid-cycle
Scope stays editable while a cycle is live — in Draft, Scheduled, Open requests and Under review — so an Owner can add or remove people when a team changes. Roles can be reassigned the same way.
Tell the people affected. Someone added to a cycle after it opens gets the standard Added to a salary review cycle notification, but nothing announces that a reporting line moved between two Approvers.