Administrator's Guide to Publishing Performance Reviews

Publishing Performance Review templates ensures only the right templates are circulating at the right time. When you publish a master template, every user selects the same version — giving you a consistent, ongoing review cycle you can export and track ratings against over time.

Who this is for: Administrators only

Read time: 4 minutes

Why publishing matters

In Prosper, Performance Review templates exist in three states: draft, active (published), and closed. Only active templates are available to users when they start a new review. This gives you full control over which templates are live across the business at any given time.

Publishing a master template means:

Consistency — every reviewer and reviewee works from the same questions, rating scales, and competencies.
Comparability — ratings can be aggregated and benchmarked across teams, sites, and review cycles.
Trackable history — exported review data remains consistent over time, so you can measure performance trends accurately.
Reduced template sprawl — staff aren't choosing between outdated or duplicate versions.

Prerequisites

You must have Administrator permissions in Prosper.
The Performance Reviews module must be enabled for your organisation.
You should have a enabled template ready to publish — including all questions, sections, rating scales, and competencies.

Before you publish: pre-flight checklist

Once a template is published and in use, changing it mid-cycle can compromise your reporting. Run through this checklist first:

Confirm the template name is clear (for example, Mid-Year Review).
Review every question for clarity and relevance to the audience.
Check rating scales are consistent across sections.
Confirm any linked competencies or values are current.
Preview the template from a reviewer's perspective.
Unpublish or archive any outdated templates that shouldn't be in circulation.

How to publish a Performance template

From the Prosper admin menu, navigate to Performance > Manage Templates.
Locate the template you want to publish in the templates list. Disabled templates display a grey Disabled status badge. Ensure all relevant review templates are enabled, ready to be published.
Confirm to enable template.
Select Performance > Manage Reviews.
Click Create New Review.
Review the template summary and select a template.
Set the review's visibility - either the individual user or the whole organisation.
Scroll to the bottom of the review Save and Publish.

The template is now available for users to select when starting a new review.

Managing multiple templates

You can have more than one template published at a time — for example, a separate template for managers and frontline staff. To keep selection clean for users:

Use clear, descriptive names that signal the audience (for example, Frontline — Quarterly Check-in vs Manager — Annual Review).
Unpublish templates from previous cycles before publishing the new cycle's template.
Avoid publishing more than two or three templates for the same audience concurrently — it creates confusion at selection time.

Unpublishing a template

Unpublishing removes a template from the user-facing selection list but does not affect reviews already completed using that template. Historical data remains intact.

Open the published template from Performance > Review Templates.
Click the ⋮ (more actions) menu in the right.
Select End Review.
Confirm in the modal (Manage Templates).

Note: Ending a review does not delete the template. It moves the ended review into the Closed tab.

Editing a published template

To protect data integrity, certain fields are locked once a template is published and has been used in at least one review. If you need to make changes:

Clone the existing published template (⋮ > Clone).
Make your edits to the new draft copy.
End the original template.
Publish the new version.

This approach keeps your reporting clean — the original template retains its historical reviews, and the new template begins a fresh, comparable dataset.

Tips and best practices

One master template per audience per cycle. This is the single biggest factor in clean, comparable reporting.
Communicate publishing events. When you publish a new cycle's template, let managers know via your usual internal comms channel so they can kick off reviews promptly.
Audit annually. At the start of each financial year, review your published templates and archive anything from cycles that are no longer relevant.

Troubleshooting

A user says they can't see a template I just published.
Ask them to refresh their browser or log out and back in. If the issue persists, check that the template's audience or eligibility rules..

The Publish button is greyed out.
The template likely has a validation issue — usually a missing question, empty section, or incomplete rating scale. Open the template editor; any blocking issues will be flagged with red indicators.

I published the wrong template.
Unpublish it immediately following the steps above. If any reviews have already been started against it, new reviews will need to be reassigned to the correct template.

Can I schedule a template to publish at a future date?
Not currently — publishing is a manual action. We recommend setting a calendar reminder for the start of each review cycle.

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