Retroactive Rate Changes: When You Update a Salary Backwards
A VP of Engineering walks out of a Q1 review and announces an 8% raise for 12 backend engineers, effective March 1. It's now May 18. Three months of finance reports already shipped to the board with the old rates baked in. HR has two options: pretend the raise started today, or retroactively update March, April, and May. Most engineering finance tools force option one. PanDev Metrics supports option two, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is the reason it has to be done carefully.
This is one of the few areas where our product genuinely diverges from LinearB, Jellyfish, and Code Climate Velocity. Those tools were built around forward-only rate models. PanDev's UserRate table is bitemporal: every rate has a startPeriod and endPeriod, and the OverheadCoefficientFullRecalcCronJob will replay activity events through new rate × overhead K when historical rows change. That's powerful. It's also exactly the kind of capability that auditors look at twice.