No exit conversation produces the sentence more reliably: “of course, the bonus is discretionary.” Sometimes true, often half-true, occasionally simply wrong — and the difference is worth real money, decided not by the meeting-room assertion but by the sorting: earned, arguable, or genuinely discretionary.
The Sorting
Earned — amounts whose conditions you’ve already satisfied: commission on completed sales, bonuses with objective targets met, entitlements the contract’s language makes contractual — are debts in substance, and packages quietly waiving them are underpriced by exactly that amount; they belong in the entitlements audit, not the generosity column. Arguable — the large middle: “discretionary” schemes paid consistently for years, targets communicated and met against discretion invoked only at exit, discretion that must be exercised rather than merely cited — where payment history, the handbook’s actual words and the pattern of treatment all bear on what’s really owed. Genuinely discretionary — truly conditional amounts, honestly weaker — though even here the exit negotiation can price them, because certainty has value to employers too. The method is document-first: contract, scheme rules and payment history read before positions are taken, each element sorted — and the negotiation run from the sorted position.
The Timing Questions
Two collisions recur: the exit-year pro-rata — you leave in month nine of a bonus year: does the package reflect nine-twelfths of a performance already substantially delivered, or does the exit-date fall extinguish it entirely? Scheme language governs, silence creates argument, and settlements can and should resolve the question explicitly rather than leave it to later dispute. And amounts crystallising after departure — commission on deals closing next quarter, bonuses declared after year-end for years you worked: the agreement should say what happens to them in terms, because “full and final” language meeting a post-exit commission run is exactly the collision careful drafting exists to prevent. Both questions interact with the termination date — sometimes the cleanest fix is the date moved across the period’s end — and both are standard terrain for the executive tier, where variable pay is often where the real value sits.
The document list for this topic: the contract’s remuneration clauses, the scheme rules or commission plan, the last few years’ payment history, and any target communications for the current year. With those, the sorting takes hours; without them, everyone is asserting.
“Discretionary” deployed against real money? The sorting decides: 01 5827148.