How do Draft Band Sets work in Aeqium?

Sometimes you'll want to stage a set of changes to your bands, such as an annual refresh, a market adjustment, or any multi-step redesign, without those changes going live piecemeal or affecting what managers, reviewers, and employees see along the way. Draft Band Sets are a dedicated workspace for exactly that: propose a full or partial revision of your bands, review it, and then publish it to your live bands all at once, or discard it if you change your mind.

Draft Band Sets are admin-only. Ladder Owners and other non-admin users cannot see or access them.

Finding your Draft Band Sets

Draft Band Sets live on their own Draft Band Sets tab on the Bands page, alongside Active Bands, Job Architecture and Band Setup, and Benchmark Imports. The tab lists every draft that currently exists, along with who created it and when.

Click a draft's name to open it. You get the same Bands table and chart experience as Active Bands, scoped to that draft, including the compensation-component tabs below the title. Click one to show only bands with that component.

Creating a Draft Band Set

From the Draft Band Sets tab, click + Add Band Set, give it a name of up to 50 characters, and click Add.

Creating a draft makes a full copy of your current Active Bands into the new draft, so from the moment it exists it is an exact snapshot of your live bands and you edit from there. There is nothing to pull in manually, there is no limit on how many drafts you can have at once, and you do not need to finish or publish one before creating another.

Editing band values in a draft

There are three ways to edit the bands in a draft: inline in the table, through the Bands Detail View, and via bulk import.

• Inline: edit a band value directly in a table cell. Your change saves automatically as soon as you click away.
• Bands Detail View: click a level to open the Bands Detail View and update the Minimum, Midpoint, and Maximum for each compensation component, exactly as you would on Active Bands. You can also change the level's Job Code and Benchmark selection here.
• Import: bring a spreadsheet of proposed values into the draft in bulk. See Importing and exporting a draft below.

Importing and exporting a draft

Both Import XLSX and Export as XLSX are available from the three-dots menu inside a draft, using the same spreadsheet format described in Bulk Compensation Bands Operations.

• Export from inside a draft downloads that draft's current bands, not your Active Bands.
• Import into a draft can create new ladders, levels, regions, and bands, and update existing draft values. The Delete Unreferenced Ladders, Levels, and Bands options apply to Active Bands imports rather than draft imports, since deletion is an Active Bands operation. To delete via spreadsheet, import from Active Bands.
• As with Add Ladder, if an import creates a brand-new ladder, that ladder is created globally regardless of which draft you imported into.

Adding ladders, levels, and regions inside a draft

You can add job architecture from the three-dots menu inside a draft, just like on Active Bands. Because job architecture (ladders, levels, and regions) is shared across your active bands and every draft, these actions do not all stay contained to the draft. Here is how each behaves.

• Add Ladder is always global. A new ladder, along with its name, currency, and compensation components, is created directly in your live job architecture, no matter which draft you were viewing.
• Add a Level creates the level globally in Active Bands right away, with its band values zeroed out until you fill them in. If you are inside a draft when you add it, Aeqium also creates a draft-scoped copy of that level's bands for you. Use the Edit Draft Band link in the snackbar notification to fill in the draft values, or find and edit it in the table.
• Add a Region to an Existing Level is contained to the draft. A region you add from inside a draft exists only in that draft until you publish, and Active Bands will not show it until then. Add a region from Active Bands instead and it goes live immediately.

Job title mappings are managed from the Active Bands view. They reassign employees in production immediately and have no draft version, so they are not available while adding a level from inside a draft.

Where deletions happen

Drafts support additive and editing changes. Deleting a ladder, level, or compensation component is done within Job Architecture and Band Setup, or by importing from within Active Bands.

Renaming and deleting a Draft Band Set

From the draft's row menu on the Draft Band Sets tab, or the three-dots menu inside the draft, choose Edit Name to rename it, or Delete to remove it entirely along with all its draft values. Deleting a draft does not touch Active Bands, so it is a clean way to discard an experiment you do not want to publish.

Publishing a Draft Band Set

When you are ready to make a draft's values live, click Publish, either from the Draft Band Sets row or from inside the draft, and confirm in the Publish Draft Band Set? dialog.

A few important things to know about publishing:

• Publishing overwrites Active Bands with the draft's values and cannot be undone, so review the draft carefully first. Any active band that also exists in the draft is overwritten by the draft's version, active bands not in the draft are left untouched, and draft bands that do not yet exist in Active Bands are created.
• It runs in the background. The draft's row shows Publishing… while it is in progress, and that draft is locked, so you cannot rename, delete, or edit it during publish.
• Only one draft can publish at a time company-wide. If another is already publishing, you will be asked to try again once it finishes. Your other drafts stay fully editable in the meantime.
• Once publishing completes, the draft is gone rather than archived. Its values now live in Active Bands.
• Publishing is subject to your plan's band and level limits, so if applying the draft would push you over a limit, the publish can fail.

Change log behavior

Edits you make inside a draft are not recorded in the band Change Log while they are still in draft, and the Change Log menu item appears on Active Bands only. History is written at the moment you publish. All of the draft's value changes and new bands are recorded together in one batch, attributed to whoever clicked Publish rather than to each individual edit made while building the draft.

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