In 2026, it’s hard to imagine organisations still running pay review on spreadsheets. And yet there are HR teams across the country gearing up for another gruelling cycle of manual data gathering, version confusion and sleepless nights as they trying to balance performance, fairness and budget – all in Excel.
Five reasons manual Pay Review is bad news for HR
- The constant need to chase managers for updates across multiple spreadsheets
- Time spent double-checking data that’s out of sync with finance and line managers
- Tenuous modelling using data that might collapse through version control
- The battle to balance equity and fairness with limited visibility of the bigger picture
- In an era defined by data, automation and AI, can HR afford to be old fashioned?
The shift from annual admin to continuous intelligence
Pay review is no longer a once-a-year admin task. If done the right way with the correct tools it should now be a continuous, insight-driven process that reflects a company’s values, fairness and growth ambitions. This means HR is under pressure to:
- Prove fairness and equity across gender, ethnicity and job levels
- Integrate reward with performance data and business outcomes
- Model real-time scenarios to forecast costs and reward strategies
- Enable transparency and communication with employees
- Give employees greater visibility of their potential to upskill and progress their career
This is modern pay review, and it demands a digital backbone that’s robust and dynamic.
Meet Advance: The Pay Review platform of the future
Advance is Innecto’s next-generation digital Pay Review tool designed to eliminate the inefficiency of manual processes and future-proof pay. For HR, it makes life easier. For organisations, it transforms how they think about reward.
1. One source of truth
With Advance, there is no more juggling spreadsheets. Advance gathers all your essential employee data - salaries, grades, performance ratings, market benchmarks - into one secure, centralised platform. HR and managers work from the same data set, in real time, meaning fewer errors, no version confusion and a clear breadcrumb from start to finish.
2. Real-time modelling and insight
Advance allows HR and decision-makers to model and re-model pay scenarios instantly. If you need to see how a 3% increase would impact your total pay bill, or how a different approach would affect your lowest-paid or high performers, Advance gives you the answer at the click of a button. In a flash, HR moves from reactive analysis to proactive insight.
3. Seamless integration with your HR ecosystem
Advance integrates with existing HR and finance systems creating a data flow that’s secure, dynamic, and scalable. This eliminates the silos that can slow down traditional pay reviews, allowing HR to spend hours interpreting data, not reconciling it.
4. Equity and compliance
Advance goes beyond the numbers, enabling HR to overlay gender and ethnicity data to evaluate pay equity before implementing changes. This not only supports compliance and DEI reporting but empowers HR to design reward strategies that reflect fairness. This shift from reactive to proactive is vital in a world where transparency and evidence-based decision-making are increasingly to the fore.
5. Manager engagement
With Advance, every manager gets a dedicated login and tailored dashboard letting them view their teams, propose changes, add comments and submit directly to HR. For HR, that means real-time visibility into who’s completed what, where any bottlenecks might lie and how decisions are progressing.
6. Security, scalability, and auditability
Crucially, Advance is built to scale with your organisation whether that’s a 200-strong SME or a multinational with 20,000 employees. By supporting multiple currencies, permission levels and approval hierarchies it can morph to fit any requirements and is designed with enterprise-grade security, protecting sensitive pay data and meeting GDPR standards.
Looking further ahead: Pay Review and AI
The need to look ahead is greater than ever. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in HR systems, Advance is already paving the way for even more integration, including:
- Predictive analytics forecasting flight risks and reward outcomes
- algorithm-led recommendations on budget distribution and pay scenarios
- automated insights into pay equity and performance correlations
For those still using manual systems, most benefits of AI will be lost. Advance provides the foundation for the future: clean data, integrated systems and transparent processes.
The Human Impact: empowering HR to lead and not react
The biggest wins in all of this are time and trust. By cutting out the admin, Advance frees up HR to focus more strategically on how pay connects with performance, fairness, engagement and retention - not once a year but on a constant basis.
The companies winning the talent race are those using tech not only to manage processes, but to inform decisions. Advance is designed for exactly that: a dynamic, data-driven pay review platform that evolves with your business, integrates with your systems and prepares you for the HR tools of tomorrow.
If you are interested in futureproofing your Pay Review, talk with our team and book a demo of Advance today.
