Review cycles

A cycle is the time window a review covers. Most performance review tools assume you run one quarterly review per year and call it done. PerfCopilot treats cycles as first-class, repeatable units — you can run weekly cycles for fast feedback, monthly cycles for tracking trends, quarterly cycles for the formal review of record, or any combination.

Cadences

PerfCopilot supports four cadences out of the box:

Weekly — Monday 00:00:00 to Sunday 23:59:59 in your org's timezone. Auto-rolls forward every Monday.
Monthly — first day of the month 00:00:00 to last day 23:59:59.
Quarterly — Q1 (Jan–Mar), Q2 (Apr–Jun), Q3 (Jul–Sep), Q4 (Oct–Dec).
Custom — any window you define. Useful for project-based reviews ("the migration sprint").

You create cycles from /admin?tab=cycles. The form picks the right Monday / first-of-month / start-of-quarter automatically based on the date you click. You can override the dates if you need to.

Running multiple cadences at once

This is the feature that makes PerfCopilot different from most review tools.

If your team runs weekly + monthly + quarterly cycles concurrently, a peer review or manual note authored on (say) May 5 attaches to all three cycles whose window covers May 5 — automatically. One canonical record, three views.

Why this matters in practice:

Your continuous-feedback rhythm (weekly cycles) stays high-frequency without losing data when it's time for the formal Q2 review.
A peer review someone gave you in week 18 still shows up in the May monthly view AND in Q2 — because all three windows cover May 5. You don't have to re-collect feedback every cadence.
Managers can switch between "What happened this week?" and "How is this person doing this quarter?" without a context-switch on the data.

How it works under the hood:

Each cycle has a window (period_start, period_end) in the org's local timezone.
Your organization has an active_cadences list — populated automatically when you create the first cycle of a cadence, and cleared when you delete the last cycle of a cadence. You don't manage it directly.
When a peer feedback or manual note is submitted, PerfCopilot finds every cycle in active_cadences whose window contains the response date, and creates one signal mirror per match. Missing cycles (e.g. you have weekly + quarterly but no monthly cycle covering May) are auto-created.

Switching between cycles on the dashboard

The cycle picker in the top-left of the dashboard groups cycles by cadence — weekly, monthly, quarterly, custom — with the most recent of each at the top. Click any cycle to switch the dashboard's view to that window.

The signals strip, peer-feedback panel, manager notes list, and AI review draft all re-scope to the selected cycle.

Closing and rolling forward

A cycle is open while its window is active and closed when the period ends (or when you close it manually). Closed cycles still surface in the dashboard for historical lookups and can be reopened if needed.

The Roll forward button on a cycle creates the next cycle in the same cadence (next week / next month / next quarter) and copies any open peer nominations forward. Useful for Monday morning when you want to set up the new week's cycle without fiddling with date pickers.

Deleting a cycle

You can delete a cycle that has no attached reviews, peer nominations, or signals (the system refuses with a 409 if any of those exist — historical data is precious). The most common case is "I created a cycle by accident with the wrong window" — delete it and create the right one.

If you delete the last cycle of a cadence, that cadence is automatically removed from active_cadences so future fan-out doesn't keep auto-creating cycles for a cadence you're no longer running.

A common pattern

For most teams that take this seriously, the recommended setup is:

Weekly cycles as the working rhythm — managers do a 5-minute Friday review of what their reports shipped, leaving notes inline.
Quarterly cycles as the review of record — generated from the weekly notes + signals, edited by the manager, delivered to the report at the end of the quarter via magic-link snapshot.

Monthly cycles are optional but useful for managers who want a mid-quarter check-in without the formality of a full review.