End Spreadsheet Chaos in Your Next Merit Cycle

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Comprehensive: Replacing Spreadsheet Chaos with Structured Compensation Planning

The Challenge

For companies between 100 and 500 employees, compensation decisions tend to exist in a precarious state: too complex for the informal conversations that worked at 20 people, but not yet warranting the enterprise systems designed for thousands. The result is usually a sprawling network of spreadsheets, email chains, and institutional knowledge that lives in one person's head.

This creates real problems beyond mere inconvenience. Merit cycles become multi-week ordeals involving dozens of tabs and manual formula checks. Pay equity analysis requires heroic data wrangling. Managers make compensation recommendations without clear visibility into bands or market rates, and employees receive total rewards information—if they receive it at all—through inconsistent, manually generated documents. As pay transparency regulations expand and employees increasingly expect clarity on how compensation decisions are made, the spreadsheet approach starts showing serious cracks.

How Comprehensive Approaches It

Comprehensive, founded in 2021 by Roger Lee (former CTO of Human Interest) and Teddy Sherrill, built its platform specifically to address this mid-market gap. The core premise is straightforward: consolidate salary planning, merit reviews, bonuses, and equity awards into a single system that maintains pay ranges, automates approval workflows, and provides market benchmarking data—all without requiring the implementation overhead of enterprise HR suites.

The platform handles the full compensation cycle through configurable workflows. Administrators can set custom rules for raises and promotions, define flexible budgets, and create formula-driven calculations that replace manual spreadsheet gymnastics. Where things get more distinctive is in the communication layer: Comprehensive generates employee-facing total rewards statements and allows managers to preview and send compensation letters directly from the platform, eliminating the batch-download-and-email routine that often delays cycle completion.

Benchmarking data comes from two sources. The platform offers free access to salary ranges from approximately 6,000 U.S. tech companies, updated regularly, plus integration with Mercer's global dataset for broader market comparisons. This dual approach gives companies both startup-relevant peer data and more comprehensive industry benchmarks without requiring separate subscriptions to compensation databases.

On the integration front, Comprehensive connects with common HRIS platforms like Workday, BambooHR, and Rippling, as well as performance management tools and cap table systems. The goal is automatic syncing of employee data, titles, salaries, and performance scores—reducing the manual data entry that creates errors and consumes time. Pay equity reporting and outlier detection are built in, flagging potential gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed until they become problems.

Who It's Built For

Comprehensive's sweet spot appears to be venture-backed technology companies that have outgrown ad-hoc compensation processes but aren't ready for (or interested in) the complexity of enterprise HR platforms. Named customers include Mercury, LaunchDarkly, Clearbit, and Clever—companies that share a common profile of rapid growth, distributed teams, and equity as a meaningful component of total compensation.

The signals that a company might be ready for this kind of tool are fairly recognizable: the annual merit cycle has become a dreaded event requiring weeks of coordination, managers lack visibility into pay ranges when making hiring or promotion decisions, and HR spends more time maintaining spreadsheets than analyzing compensation strategy. Companies in heavily regulated states like California, where pay transparency requirements have expanded, may feel additional urgency to systematize their approach.

What Customers Are Saying

User feedback, primarily from G2 reviews where Comprehensive holds a 4.9 out of 5 rating from 23 reviewers, clusters around a few consistent themes. The time savings are frequently cited—one HR Director reported an 80 percent reduction in their compensation cycle process time. The platform's support team receives particularly strong marks, with one global HR manager describing the implementation support as "exceptional" when working against tight deadlines.

The direct letter-sending capability appears to resonate with managers. As one reviewer noted, "The ability to preview and email letters directly... was a standout feature... managers found it incredibly helpful." Users also appreciate having reliable data in front of decision-makers; one customer highlighted that the platform provides "the correct information and visibility" that managers previously lacked. The criticisms that do appear tend to focus on initial setup complexity—several users mentioned that data imports were confusing without clear templates—and requests for more polished analytics interfaces, such as better column reorganization and geographic grouping options.

Getting Started

Comprehensive doesn't publish pricing, though TechCrunch reported the company charges subscription fees based on headcount. The lack of public pricing means prospective buyers should expect a sales conversation and should clarify total costs including any integration support or implementation fees. G2 data suggests a median implementation timeline of about two months, though the company advertises faster basic setups.

The implementation approach emphasizes vendor involvement rather than self-service—Comprehensive provides "compensation experts" to lead setup, and reviewers consistently reference hands-on customer success support. Companies should plan for some configuration time to set up approval workflows, pay bands, and integration connections, but the consensus from existing users is that the vendor team shoulders much of that burden.

Key Takeaway

For mid-market companies—particularly in tech—that have reached the limits of spreadsheet-based compensation management, Comprehensive offers a purpose-built alternative that addresses the specific pain points of merit cycles, pay transparency, and total rewards communication. It won't be the right fit for every organization, particularly those outside the U.S. or in industries far from tech, but for its target profile, the combination of workflow automation, integrated benchmarking, and strong implementation support represents a meaningful step up from the status quo.

Learn more at comprehensive.io