What this step is for
The purpose of Data Onboarding is to bring your employee, employment and compensation data into PayGap in a structure that is clean, complete, consistent and ready for analysis.
To make that possible, the platform needs three things from you in this step:
a clear definition of which pay components make up total compensation in your organisation,
an employee data file that follows the PayGap data specification,
a configured PayGap workspace where pay components and custom fields are set up correctly before the file is uploaded.
What is most important in this step
Three things matter more than anything else in Data Onboarding:
Get the pay components right. The way you group base pay, bonuses, allowances, pension, benefits and other elements directly determines what your analysis can show. This is a structural decision, not a technical one and it is best made in a workshop with the people who own payroll, reward and HR data.
Configure PayGap before you upload. Pay components and custom fields that do not exist in the platform at the moment of upload cannot be mapped. The data in those columns will simply not be imported, even if the rest of the file is correct.
Validate the data after upload. Outliers in box plots, unexpected averages, or employees with very low or very high values are usually a signal that something in the source file or the FTE handling needs to be corrected. Fixing it now, before you start the analysis, saves a significant amount of work later.
Step-by-step: how to complete Data Onboarding
The Data Onboarding collection takes you through the step in five articles. We recommend going through them in this order:
1. Identify your pay components Run a workshop to map out what counts as pay in your organisation, decide what should be included in the first analysis, and agree on a practical grouping structure. This is the strategic foundation for everything that follows. 👉 Workshop: how to identify pay components for analysis?
2. Set up pay components in PayGap Translate the output of the workshop into PayGap. Create groups (e.g. STI, LTI, Allowances), add the individual components, set the default pay period for each, and decide whether each component should be FTE-adjusted by the platform. 👉 Set up pay components in PayGap
3. Set up custom fields (if needed) If your file contains data points that are not part of PayGap's standard data specification create them as Employee or Employment custom fields before uploading. 👉 Set up custom fields in PayGap
4. Prepare your employee data file Format the file according to the PayGap data specification: one row per employee, no duplicate Employee IDs, mandatory fields completed, dates stored as real dates in Excel, numeric fields without text values, and a clear, consistent decision on how FTE is handled. 👉 Prepare your employee data file for PayGap upload
5. Upload and validate the data Upload the file in Data Management → Upload, review the suggested column mapping, map legal entities to countries, submit, and then check the result in Employees, Descriptive Analysis and Case Management to confirm that nothing looks off. If something is wrong, correct the source file and upload again. 👉 Upload employee data to PayGap
What good output looks like
By the end of Data Onboarding you should have:
a documented list of pay components used in your organisation, grouped in a way that makes analytical sense,
those pay components configured in PayGap, with the correct default pay period and FTE adjustment setting,
any non-standard data points created as Employee or Employment custom fields,
an employee file that passes upload without errors and that contains all active employees,
legal entities mapped to the correct countries,
a validated dataset, with no obvious outliers or standardisation issues, ready to be used in comparable jobs and base analysis.
When all of this is true, Data Onboarding is complete and you can move on to the next step: setting up Comparable Jobs.
Common questions
Do I have to include every single pay component in the first upload? No. Start with the components that are material and not equally distributed. Smaller or harder-to-collect elements can be added in a later phase.
Should I configure pay components and custom fields before or after upload? Always before. If a component or custom field does not exist in PayGap at the moment of import, that column cannot be mapped and the values will not be imported.
My file uploaded successfully - am I done?
Not yet. A successful upload only means the file passed validation. You should still review employee counts, run box plots in Descriptive Analysis, and spot-check Case Management for outliers before treating the dataset as ready for analysis.
What if I made a mistake in the upload?
You will have to upload a corrected file, which overrides the previous data for that legal entity.