Compensation

Role classification, salary bands, dated assignments, and the employee self-view.

The compensation module explains pay policy: what roles exist, what each is worth, and where a given person sits and why.

Compensation never writes an employee’s actual salary. That lives on the employment period. The separation is deliberate — policy and fact are different things, and conflating them is how a band update silently becomes a pay change.

Roles (Funktionsstufen)

A catalog of role classifications: a code, a name, a description of the scope and responsibility the level represents. Roles can be scoped to a legal entity where different Rechtsträger genuinely classify differently.

Codes are unique, and a role in use by an assignment cannot be deleted — the history has to stay resolvable.

Salary bands

A band attaches a pay range to a role. Two shapes are supported:

Shape	What it is	Suits
RANGE	A minimum and a maximum, continuous.	Private-sector style discretionary placement.
STEPS	Discrete steps, typically by service years or qualification.	Public-sector and school salary scales.

Bands are dated, so an annual revision creates a new version rather than rewriting history. A payslip from two years ago still resolves against the band that applied then.

Assignments

An assignment places an employee in a role, and in a step where the band uses steps, from a given date. Assignments are dated for the same reason employment periods are: a promotion is a new assignment, not an overwrite.

Each assignment records the placement rationale — why this person sits at this point in the band. That is the sentence a manager needs when the question is asked, and the record that makes pay decisions reviewable.

The employee self-view

Employees see their own compensation picture in the portal and the mobile app:

• Their role and what it means.
• The band that applies to it.
• Where they sit within it, and the recorded rationale.

The self-view is strictly a self-view. It does not compare the person against colleagues, does not show a percentile, and does not rank. Per ADR-006, the product explains pay policy — it does not gamify it.

Salary visibility

Compensation policy is one thing; individual salary amounts are another and are closed by default.

Who	Sees
ADMIN+ with salaries:view-all	Everything.
HR staff with a salary access grant	Only the team or Standort the grant covers.
Managers	Strictly below themselves in the org graph — never at or above their own level.
Everyone else	Masked.

Masking happens at the API layer. A masked field is masked in the response, not hidden in the browser.

Administering grants is ADMIN-only. Granting salary access is itself a compensation-sensitive decision, so it does not sit with the people who use it.

Permissions

Capability	Role
compensation:view	HR_STAFF+
compensation:manage	HR_STAFF+
salaries:view-all	ADMIN+
salary-access:view	ADMIN+
salary-access:manage	ADMIN+

Bands and assignments are HR master data — unlike the legal-entity records, they do not re-route statutory declarations — so HR staff manage them. Employees read their own view through a session-scoped portal route that needs no role permission at all.