Pay and Compensation Tools: SalaryRange, JobBands and CEOSalary
An HR generalist at a 60-person company has to post a job by Friday, and the posting needs a pay range. A people-ops lead at a 200-person manufacturer has 140 job titles and no idea which ones belong on the same level. A CEO has a renewal conversation with the board next month and a number in mind that came from a salary website. These are three different pay questions, and they need three different kinds of data.
We built one product for each: SalaryRange, JobBands and CEOSalary. This article covers what each one does, who it is for, the public data each relies on, what each store sells today, and where each app stands.
Why compensation, and why three products
Rovaryn builds software for B2B niches that are too small for enterprise vendors and too specialized for generalist platforms. (We explain that thinking in The Opportunity in "Too Small".) Compensation fits this well. Large employers buy compensation suites and survey subscriptions, and they hire consultants. A 40-person firm or a single executive usually has a spreadsheet and a few browser tabs.
We could have built one broad "comp tool". Instead we split it, because the three jobs have different users and different sources:
Building a salary range for one role is a task for an HR generalist, and the natural source is government wage data.
Building a band structure across every role is a bigger architecture project for an HR manager. It uses the same wage data, but it needs to be organised by job family and level.
Benchmarking an executive's pay is a personal question for the executive, and the natural source is what peer companies disclose in public filings.
SalaryRange: one defensible range, quickly
SalaryRange is a self-serve salary-range builder. You search for an occupation, and it seeds minimum, midpoint and maximum figures from public wage data. It then applies the spread and geographic adjustments you configure and produces posting text and audit documentation.
The data underneath is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, which publishes estimates for about 830 occupations for the nation, for each state, and for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. OEWS publishes 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile wages, and that spread is what makes it useful for setting a range rather than a single number. For Canada, the product uses Statistics Canada occupational data organised by the National Occupational Classification (NOC).
Two things are worth knowing about OEWS before you rely on any tool built on it. First, its wage definition is straight-time gross pay. It includes commissions and production bonuses but excludes overtime, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses and benefits. Second, each release pools survey responses collected over a three-year period, so it is a carefully built benchmark rather than a live market quote. A good range starts from that benchmark and then makes your own adjustments visible.
What the product is designed to do:
Occupation search by BLS SOC codes (US) and NOC codes (Canada).
Percentile wages at national, state and metro level, plus Statistics Canada percentiles by province and metro area (CMA) on the Professional tier and above.
A range-spread configurator for min, mid and max, with recommended defaults.
Side-by-side band charts for up to five roles.
Geographic adjustment for multi-office and remote tiers.
Posting-ready compliance export in jurisdiction-specific formats.
A timestamped audit trail of how each range was built.
Why the audit trail matters: pay-transparency laws generally ask for a real range, not a placeholder. New York, for example, requires covered employers (four or more employees) to list a compensation range, meaning a minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly rate, for advertised jobs, promotions and transfers. Rules differ by state and province, so treat this as general background rather than legal advice, and check the rules where you hire.
Who it is for: HR managers and people-ops leads at companies of roughly 10 to 200 employees, especially employers under pay-transparency rules in the US or Canada.
JobBands: the structure behind the ranges
JobBands picks up where a single range stops. Once you have ranges for 15 roles, the next question is how they relate to each other. Is a Senior Analyst in finance on the same level as a Senior Coordinator in operations? Where does a promotion move someone? Without a structure, every new range is a one-off, and a pay-transparency posting can expose inconsistencies that were never written down.
JobBands is a job-architecture tool for HR generalists at companies of roughly 25 to 250 people. You build job families, define levels within each one, set min/mid/max bands, and check them against the same BLS OEWS and Statistics Canada benchmarks.
What the product is designed to do:
Job-family builder with level naming inside each family.
Job-level creator with title, code and description (up to 25 levels on Essentials, unlimited on Professional and above).
Band builder with automatic spread, range width and guardrail flags.
Benchmark overlays from BLS OEWS (national, state, metro) and Statistics Canada (province and CMA, Professional and above).
A band-positioning indicator that shows where each band sits against the published percentiles.
A pay-transparency range generator for eight US states plus Ontario and British Columbia.
A PDF band-structure report and audit log on the Professional tier and above.
Who it is for: HR managers and directors at companies of 25 to 250 people in manufacturing, professional services, healthcare, nonprofits, logistics, construction and retail; multi-location employers that need geographic adjustments; and companies moving into regions with pay-transparency rules.
The simplest way to tell SalaryRange and JobBands apart: SalaryRange answers "what should this role's range be?" JobBands answers "how should all our roles fit together?"
CEOSalary: executive pay from public filings
CEOSalary answers a different question for a different person. It is a single-seat benchmarking tool for CEOs, presidents and other C-suite executives at public and large private US companies. You build a peer set by revenue band, sector, region and ownership type. The tool then shows where your pay sits at the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles, with every figure cited back to the filing it came from.
The sources are public. US public companies report executive pay under Item 402 of Regulation S-K, which covers the Summary Compensation Table and related tables. That disclosure usually appears in the annual proxy statement, filed on EDGAR as a DEF 14A, and EDGAR is free to search. For nonprofits, Form 990 Part VII reports compensation for officers, directors, trustees, key employees and the highest-paid employees, and Schedule J breaks that pay into base, bonus, deferred compensation and benefits. Exempt organizations must make their returns available for public inspection for three years.
The raw material is free. The work is in choosing comparable peers, normalising figures across companies, and keeping track of where each number came from. We wrote more about why that takes longer than it looks in Why CEO Salary Research Deserves More Than an Afternoon.
What the product is designed to do:
Peer-set builder with revenue, sector, region and ownership filters.
SEC DEF 14A and XBRL ingestion, normalised and cross-validated.
Form 990 nonprofit positioning on the Tracker tier and above.
Percentile reports with a citation on every figure.
A negotiation case-builder PDF to bring into the meeting.
An offer-comparison calculator and an equity-valuation helper.
Saved peer-set alerts when new filings land.
It is built on filings, never a paid survey, and it is designed to be bought on a personal card rather than through a company expense line, since the executive is the user.
Who it is for: CEOs and C-suite executives preparing for an offer, renewal or severance conversation; incoming and first-time public-company CEOs; executives comparing several offers; and board or comp-committee members who want to see the filings behind a recommendation.
What is in each store today
All three apps are on a waitlist and are not yet open for sign-up. All three stores are live now, and each sells templates that handle the same work by hand.
The SalaryRange store covers the full salary-review cycle. It includes, among others:
Salary Range Builder Workbook, for ranges built from BLS and Statistics Canada data.
Pay Transparency Compliance Kit and Compensation Benchmarking Spreadsheet.
Offer Placement & Approval Worksheet and Counter-Offer Decision & Ripple Workbook.
Merit Increase Budget Modeling Workbook, Pay Compression Diagnostic & Remediation Workbook and Range Aging & Midpoint Drift Workbook.
Manager's Pay Conversation Guide & Scripts and a Pay Action Ledger & Audit Trail Workbook.
It also has a Salary Review Cycle Starter Bundle and a Complete Cycle Kit.
The JobBands store focuses on structure and posting compliance:
Job Band Structure Builder, for min/mid/max bands across up to 10 job families.
Job Leveling Framework Template, Compensation Philosophy Workbook and Pay Equity Audit Workbook.
Pay Transparency Job Posting Kit, plus state kits for California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Washington. The California kit is free.
The CEOSalary store is built around the executive's own case:
Quick-Start Peer Comparison Worksheet and Peer-Set Construction Playbook.
Proxy Peer-Group Extraction Workbook, Proxy Statement Reading Guide and Proxy Disclosure Decoder.
CEO Compensation Negotiation Kit, Severance & Change-of-Control Review Checklist and Equity-Grant Valuation Workbook.
Sector reports for technology and healthcare, a Nonprofit Executive Director Salary Benchmark Report, and a Director / Board-Seat Compensation Benchmark Workbook.
It also sells a Complete Executive Career Kit that bundles the line.
Which one fits
You need a defensible range for a role you are posting. Start with SalaryRange.
You have dozens of roles and no levels. Start with JobBands.
The pay in question is your own, at the executive level. Start with CEOSalary.
The first two can work in sequence: ranges first, then a structure once you have enough of them to compare. CEOSalary stands on its own.
Where to go next
The Rovaryn product pages summarise each product and link to its site, store and waitlist: SalaryRange, JobBands and CEOSalary. Every Rovaryn product is at /products. If you are naming a company in this space, our payroll and compensation domains are listed at fixed prices. Questions are welcome at /contact.