Hi Billy.

Appraisals only work with static dates. All users start the appraisal at the same time and the stage completion dates are fixed for everyone. There isn't any plan to allow stages to be specified with certain durations and then allow users to join at any time (as far as I know), and I'm quite sure that refactoring appraisals to work like that would be difficult.

You achieve something similar, but it's not ideal. The most blunt way is to create multiple appraisals. It's pretty easy to copy appraisals once they're set up. Create one for each month (or two months perhaps), adjust the stage completion dates and then assign different groups of users to their corresponding appraisal (create audiences, based on criteria such as creation date or position assignment date etc, which match the start date of each periodic appraisal).

Another thing that might help you is that we're looking into a patch which will allow appraisals to handle changes to users. The specific problem was to deal with changing managers, but it will almost certainly also handle users being added or removed from audiences. The stage dates of the appraisal will still be static, but at least you could add users in after an appraisal has started. This change would be added to Totara 2.6 in April (I think) at the earliest (I've done some work on it already and we want to get it included, but there's just so much work to be done).

Sorry that there's not much else you can do, but it was designed specifically to be static and it'd be hard to change it to work dynamically (although if enough people spoke up then we might have to investigate that option).

Nathan