In general, you do not need to save your projects before making additions or changes to the existing data, however some circumstances may exist where your organization would like a history of changes that are made. For example, your organization may re-evaluate your Job Classes every three years and want a history of the previous evaluations maintained or you may have a large amount of data to upload and you are concerned about doing it properly.
In these 2 scenarios the Compensation Tool provides 2 separate solutions and a third option.
1. In the second scenario where you are worried about a large upload of data, the Compensation Tool automatically creates a backup of your data before ingesting the upload that you can revert to if anything goes wrong with your upload. This is done without having to do anything on your end.
More about Upload Backups Here
2. You can archive a project at any time, which creates a read only carbon copy of your project in its current state. At any point in the future you can access the archive and export any required documentation.
More about Archives Here
The third option, when Jobs are re-evaluated, but you want to maintain a historical record of the original evaluation and keep one Pay Equity Plan, you can change the name of the current or former Job Class title, essentially creating a new Job Class for the newly evaluated (re-evaluated) Job Classes.
For example, Company A has decided to re-evaluate a Job Class because of new technology or legislation creating a significant change in the day to day activities of the Job Class, thus creating a new evaluation point total and potentially changing any comparisons in the analysis for this role. The challenge is that a change in evaluation will change the score for the Job Class in previous years (prior to the change in circumstances that warranted the re-evaluation) and thus inappropriately create comparisons in the analysis that are incorrect. To remedy this you can archive your Project and essentially start a fresh Project with the same base of data (maintaining gender dominance for the Job Classes) and having access to the same banding scenario.
If asked to provide a Pay Equity Plan, you would produce 2 separate plans (one for before the re-evaluation and one for after). The Plans would have the same Gender Predominance for each Job Class and maintain the same Banding Scenario. The other option is to create a new Job Class for the re-evaluated Job Class, which can make sense according to the Pay Equity Legislation (as the Job does not have the same duties as previously), however this scenario would create a new Gender Analysis for the Job Class and may change the Gender of the Job Class. Once the old Job Class no longer has employees, it will no longer be included in the future years of the Pay Equity analysis, but will maintain the history of the Job Class where employees were present.
Both scenarios have their benefits, in general you do not want to create a significant number of Pay Equity Plans every time a few roles are re-evaluated and hence the third option would work better, however, if you re-evaluated all the roles in your organization on a scheduled basis (ie, every three years) regardless of changes in the Job Class duties than archiving would probably be your best option as it maintains the gender history.
For more information and strategies on how to best utilizes the Compensation Tool for your needs please contact an HCI Consultant.