Compensation app - creating cycle - participants

Hi, We are about to launch our first cycle in compensation app regarding salary increases.
We have 5 legal entity and 4 different curencies in our company. Please look at this question - maybe you will have some advise for us?
If the list of participants is not finalized in the cycle, any setup done afterwards is deleted. I set up budgets, exchange rates, and approvers, but when I returned to the Participants section and removed one employee, all my changes disappeared, even though they had been saved before.