Base salary is one line of the real number. Total compensation adds variable pay (bonuses, commissions), benefits (insurance, education budget, extra days off), equity where it exists, and the durable perks people price in — remote flexibility, hardware, conference budgets.
Two practicalities for IT companies in CEE:
- Contract type changes the math. A B2B contractor rate and an employment-contract salary are not comparable line by line — taxes, paid leave, notice and job security all sit differently. Comparing offers, or people, starts with normalizing to the same basis.
- Compensation is the dominant cost. In a services business people are most of the P&L, so compensation discipline is margin discipline: a raise process anchored to written salary bands beats one driven by who negotiates loudest.
That is why total comp needs to be written down per person and per grade: offers, reviews and promotion conversations all argue about the full package, and a company that only tracks base salary discovers its real costs — and its internal inequities — by accident.
In Helia, compensation history records the amount, currency, effective date and reason for every change; career grades carry salary bands (min, max, currency), with band suggestions computed from the actual current salaries at that grade; compensation stays HR-only with access logged, and feeds the payroll input export.