People & HR

How to set compensation bands as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're a 2-person HR team and compensation review season means pulling salary data out of Paylocity or ADP into a spreadsheet, hunting down market data from Levels.fyi or the Radford survey PDF someone emailed six months ago, building band ranges in Excel with no version control, and then explaining your methodology to the CFO in a slide deck you built at 11pm. Bands drift out of date the moment you set them. Managers find out what the ranges are through back-channels and start gaming them. You have no system — you have a spreadsheet and a prayer.

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People & HRFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A compensation band dashboard that pulls your actual headcount and payroll data from Paylocity or ADP and maps every role against defined salary ranges — so you can see who's in-band, below-band, and at risk of attrition in one view

A scenario model that shows what happens to total payroll cost if you adjust bands up 10% across engineering, or peg a new role's range to a specific market percentile — before you commit to anything

A shareable, presentation-ready summary of your band structure for manager and leadership review — no Sunday-night slide wrangling required

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scenario Analysis Presentation Agent Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule — employee records, pay statements, org units — so the band model is always working from your actual payroll numbers, not a CSV you exported last month. For market benchmark sources or survey PDFs stored in Notion, Starch connects directly to Notion on a schedule to pull in reference data. If you use BambooHR or Rippling, connect them from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when the app runs. No manual exports needed.

Prompts to copy

Pull our current headcount and salary data from Paylocity. Build a compensation band model with three ranges — floor, midpoint, ceiling — for each job family. Show me who is currently below band, in band, and above band. Let me toggle market benchmarks at P50 and P75.

Show me two scenarios side by side: one where we raise engineering bands 12% to hit P60 market, and one where we hold bands flat but add a retention bonus pool of $150k. For each, show total annual payroll impact and how many current employees fall out of band.

Build a 10-slide presentation summarizing our 2026 compensation band structure, methodology, and proposed changes — formatted for a leadership review. Include a summary of out-of-band employees by department and the cost to bring them into range.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP — Starch syncs your employee records, pay statements, and org units on a schedule. If you're on BambooHR or Rippling, connect from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live.

2 Tell Starch your job family taxonomy — either paste it in or describe it in plain language (e.g., 'we have four engineering levels, two sales tracks, and a G&A group'). Starch structures the band model around your actual org, not a generic template.

3 Type your first prompt: ask Starch to map every active employee to a job family and salary range, then surface who is below band, in band, and above band by department. This is the diagnostic view you've never had time to build.

4 Pull in market benchmark data. If you have a salary survey in Notion or Google Drive, connect Notion on a schedule or connect Google Drive from Starch's integration catalog. If your benchmarks live on a web-based tool, Starch can automate that site through your browser — no API needed.

5 Set your band methodology in plain language — 'use P50 as midpoint, P40 as floor, P65 as ceiling for each role level' — and ask Starch to apply it to every job family. You can adjust the percentile logic per track (e.g., a different philosophy for sales vs. engineering).

6 Open the Scenario Analysis app. Model two or three futures: hold bands flat, raise them across the board, or make surgical adjustments by department. Each scenario shows total annual payroll impact and the number of out-of-band employees that need remediation.

7 Ask Starch to flag flight-risk patterns: roles where your midpoint is more than 15% below market P50, or where you have multiple employees sitting below band floor. These are the conversations you need to have with the CFO before they become exit interviews.

8 Bring the CFO into the numbers early. Export the scenario comparison — payroll delta by scenario, headcount affected, cost to remediate — and paste the key numbers into a Slack message or share a Starch view directly.

9 Use the Presentation Agent to build the leadership-review deck. Describe what you need: 'a 10-slide comp band review covering methodology, current state by department, proposed changes, and total cost impact.' Export to PDF or PowerPoint for the all-hands or board packet.

10 Store your band documentation and methodology in the Knowledge Management app so the next time a manager asks 'what's the band for a Senior Engineer?' there's a real answer that isn't you on Slack at 7am.

11 Set a reminder — or an automation — to re-run the band analysis quarterly. Tell Starch: 'Every quarter, pull updated Paylocity data and flag any employees who have drifted out of band since the last review.' You get a Slack summary without touching a spreadsheet.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Compensation Band Review — 148 employees across 6 departments

Sample numbers from a real run

Engineering (L1–L4) — employees below band floor	7
Annual cost to bring below-band engineers into range (P50 midpoint)	94,000
Sales (AE, SDR, AM) — employees above band ceiling	3
G&A — in-band employees requiring no action	41
Scenario A: Raise all engineering bands 12% — total payroll delta	312,000
Scenario B: Targeted remediation only (7 employees) — total payroll delta	94,000

In February 2026, your team runs the first structured comp band review in 18 months. Starch pulls 148 active employee records from Paylocity — titles, pay rates, departments, tenure — and maps them against the job family structure you described in plain language. The diagnostic view surfaces immediately that 7 engineering employees sit below the band floor you set at P40 for their level, and 3 senior AEs are above ceiling, which is a different kind of problem. You run two scenarios in the Scenario Analysis app: Scenario A raises all engineering bands 12% to close the gap to P60 market, costing $312k in additional annual payroll across the team. Scenario B does targeted remediation only — bringing the 7 below-floor engineers to midpoint — at $94k. The CFO wants Scenario B with a six-month review trigger. You build the leadership deck in Presentation Agent: 10 slides, band ranges by department, out-of-band count, methodology, and the two scenario costs. The whole analysis — from first prompt to final PDF — takes one afternoon instead of two weeks of spreadsheet archaeology.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Percentage of employees in-band by department (target: >85% in-band before the next review cycle)

Cost to remediate out-of-band employees as a share of total payroll (tracks whether band drift is becoming a budget problem)

Time to complete annual comp band review (baseline: weeks of spreadsheet work; target: one afternoon with Starch)

Manager escalations about comp fairness per quarter (a lagging signal that band documentation and communication are working)

Band methodology documented and accessible to HR team and managers (yes/no — tracked in Knowledge Management)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets) built manually each cycle

Free and flexible, but disconnected from your live payroll data — you're always working off a stale export, version control is a nightmare, and the model dies with the person who built it.

Radford / Mercer / Levels.fyi survey data alone

Good market benchmarks, but they don't know your actual headcount or payroll — you still have to do all the internal mapping work manually.

Lattice Compensation or Pave

Purpose-built for comp management with solid market data integrations, but adds another point solution to your stack, costs meaningfully for a 150-person company, and still can't connect your comp decisions to financial scenarios or automatically generate your board deck.

Your HRIS reporting module (Paylocity, BambooHR built-in reports)

Shows you your data but can't run band analysis, scenario modeling, or surface out-of-band employees — you get raw numbers, not a decision.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scenario planning, presentation agent, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We're on BambooHR, not Paylocity or ADP. Does this still work?

Yes. Connect BambooHR from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries your employee data live when the app runs. You won't get scheduled sync the way you do with Paylocity or ADP, but the band analysis and scenario modeling work the same way.

Where does the market benchmark data come from? Do we need a Radford subscription?

Starch doesn't provide salary benchmarks natively — you bring your own. If you have a Radford or Mercer survey in PDF, or a compensation philosophy doc in Notion, connect Notion on a schedule and reference it in your prompt. If your benchmarks live on a web-based tool your team logs into, Starch can automate that site through your browser — no API needed. Levels.fyi is publicly accessible and browser-automatable.

Can managers see the comp bands directly, or does everything go through HR?

You control what gets shared. You can export a view or PDF to share with specific managers, or publish a read-only Starch view with only the fields you want visible. The underlying payroll data stays behind your connected accounts.

Is our payroll data stored in Starch? What are the security implications?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your company has strict data residency requirements, that's worth knowing upfront. Your Paylocity or ADP sync data lives in Starch's database while the connection is active. For companies at 150 employees, most HR teams find this acceptable; larger regulated environments may want to wait for the SOC 2 certification, which is on the roadmap.

We've never had formal bands before. Can Starch help us build the job family structure from scratch?

Yes. Describe your org in plain language — 'we have four engineering levels, two sales roles, and a G&A group' — and ask Starch to propose a job family structure based on your actual headcount and titles pulled from Paylocity. It's a starting point you can edit, not a framework you have to conform to.

The Presentation Agent sounds useful for the leadership deck — is it available now?

Presentation Agent is currently in development. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the scenario and band analysis outputs can be exported and pasted into your existing slide tool.

Can Starch run the band analysis automatically every quarter without us kicking it off?

Yes. Set up an automation in Starch: 'Every quarter, pull updated Paylocity data, rerun the band analysis, and Slack me a summary of any employees who have drifted out of band since the last review.' Scheduled automations run without you touching anything.