Bonus / Merit Increase Planner

The problem this kills

Comp season is a spreadsheet horror show. You email every manager a tab of their team, paste their salaries and ratings, and beg them to type recommendations into the right cells. Three of them overwrite the formulas. One emails the file to the wrong person and now Dana in Marketing has seen the whole department's pay. The total comes back 11% over the pool and you have to chase everyone to trim. Two top performers got 1% while a quiet underperformer got 6% and nobody noticed until it shipped. Half the increases blow past the top of the pay band. And when leadership finally says "approved," there's no clean record of who actually signed off on what - just a forwarded email chain and a file named comp_FINAL_v7_REALLY_final.xlsx.

The numbers aren't the hard part. The hard part is doing it confidentially, keeping it inside the budget, catching the outliers, and getting a real approval on the record before any of it touches payroll. That's exactly what this tool enforces.

What you'll build

A small, confidential internal web app, just for finance/HR and managers, that:

• Loads your roster and your pool - import employees (salary, rating, department, pay range) from a CSV, and set the total bonus pool and merit budget for the cycle.
• Lets each manager recommend - and only for their own people. Managers log in and enter a bonus amount and a merit-increase percent for each direct report. Row-level security means a manager literally cannot see anyone outside their team.
• Checks every number against the rules in real time - the agent totals all recommendations against the pool, shows remaining budget live, and blocks a submission that would bust the cap.
• Flags the outliers automatically - increases that push someone past the top of their pay range, amounts that fall outside your target-by-rating guidelines, and equity gaps (e.g. a high rating getting a low increase, or similar roles drifting apart).
• Routes the whole package to leadership for a hard approval gate - leadership sees budget-vs-pool, every flag, and a one-click approve/return-for-edits. Nothing is "final" until they approve.
• Dedupes on employee + cycle so the same person can't be planned twice in one round.
• Exports a payroll-ready bonus/merit file and a matching GL comp-accrual entry - the exact columns your payroll system and your ledger expect.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, and every step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how your comp cycle runs today, what fields and codes live in your roster, how your pool and merit budget are split, your exact target-percent-by-rating rules and range guardrails, your typical and peak headcount, who approves at what level, and your messiest edge cases (mid-year hires, employees on leave, promotions, currency, a manager who left). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your comp process and your payroll/GL formats, not a generic template you have to fight.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model, the budget math, and the outlier rules.
• The full build: database, confidential login, roster + pool import with duplicate guards, the manager recommendation screens, the live budget checker, the outlier flagging engine, and the leadership approval workflow.
• The hard human-in-the-loop approval gate and the confidentiality controls.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable today - even before you connect it to your HRIS or payroll system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Compensation data is some of the most sensitive data your company holds. The plan builds in the controls a finance/HR team actually needs:

• Login so only finance, HR, and managers can get in - and managers see only their own team.
• Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's data, and within it, only the employees they're allowed to see. No accidental "reply-all with everyone's salary."
• A complete audit trail - every recommendation, edit, flag override, approval, and export is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI checks budgets and drafts flags, but leadership must review and approve; nothing is ever auto-finalized or auto-sent to payroll.
• Budget caps enforced in code - a set of recommendations that exceeds the pool physically cannot be submitted or approved.
• Duplicate guards so the same employee can't be planned twice in one cycle.

Who it's for

Finance and HR partners, comp analysts, controllers, and ops/BPM folks who run the annual bonus and merit cycle on a sprawling, error-prone spreadsheet - and want a confidential, auditable planning tool that keeps them inside the budget and catches the outliers, without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight comp platform. You don't need to write code. You need your roster CSV, your pool and budget numbers, your allocation rules, and a weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.