PTO / Leave Accrual Tracker

The problem this kills

Every period you have to answer two questions that never get easier: how much paid time off does each employee actually have right now, and what is all that unused leave worth on the balance sheet? So you open the spreadsheet. You add this period's accrual to everyone, subtract the vacation and sick days people took, watch for anyone who's gone negative, cap the ones who've hit the ceiling, apply the higher rate to the folks who just passed a tenure milestone, and then multiply every remaining hour by a pay rate to get the leave-liability number your accountant needs.

It is tedious, and it is fragile. One copied-down formula that skips a row, one person whose pay raise didn't make it into the liability calc, one over-cap balance that should have stopped accruing months ago — and the balances your employees see are wrong and the accrual you book is wrong. The rules themselves aren't complicated; keeping them applied consistently to every employee, every single period, by hand, is what breaks.

This is exactly the kind of rules-based, repeat-it-every-period calculation that a small internal tool does better than a spreadsheet — and you do not need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for leave accruals. You load your accrual policy (how fast people earn, the cap, the carryover rule, any tenure-based rates) and your employee roster (with hire dates and current pay rates), then import the leave taken during the period. The tool accrues the right number of hours for each person, subtracts what they used, and computes everyone's new balance — respecting the cap so balances stop growing at the ceiling and carryover rules at year boundaries. Then it values the total unused leave at current pay rates to give you the dollar leave-liability figure.

AI proposes the per-period accrual and the updated balances, and flags the exceptions on one screen — anyone who went negative, anyone over the cap, anyone whose tenure rate just changed, anyone missing a pay rate. HR or finance reviews the run, fixes or adjusts the odd ones, and clicks Approve. Only then does the tool produce updated balances to push back to HR/payroll and a GL-ready leave-liability accrual entry.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your accrual rates and how they're earned, your cap and carryover rules, your tenure tiers, how your roster and leave records are shaped and named, your pay-rate source, and your nastiest edge cases — and then tailors the data model, the accrual math, and every later step to your answers. This is a build shaped around your leave policy, not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the database schema, importing the policy and roster, the leave-taken import with its duplicate guards, the accrual-and-balance engine, the policy-breach flags, the HR/finance review-and-approve screen, and the export of updated balances plus the leave-liability accrual. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. Because the whole thing runs on CSV in and GL-ready CSV out, you can build and use it this afternoon even if you have no direct connection to your HR or payroll system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This sets the balances employees rely on and an accrual that hits the general ledger, so it is built like it matters: login so only your HR/finance team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data, and a complete audit trail of every import, balance adjustment, approval, and export — who did what, and when. Nothing posts automatically: the period accrual and any balance adjustments are a draft until HR/finance approves, and approval is the hard human-in-the-loop gate before the liability entry is booked. Duplicate guards on employee-plus-period mean the same period can't be accrued twice and the same leave entry can't be counted twice.

Who it's for

HR and payroll administrators who maintain leave balances, and the accountants who own the related liability accrual. If you can explain how your people earn, cap, and carry over their PTO, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let it interview you about your leave policy.