Timesheet Collection & Approval

The problem this kills

Every pay period, the same scramble. Half the team submits their hours on time; the rest you chase by text. The hours come in as a spreadsheet, a photo of a paper sheet, and three different "I worked my usual" emails. Then you do the math by hand: who crossed 40 and earned overtime, who forgot to clock out and somehow logged a 19-hour Tuesday, who took PTO that shouldn't count toward overtime, who's on two pay rates this period. The manager eyeballs it and says "looks fine." You re-key the totals into the payroll system, pray you didn't fat-finger a number, and find out you did when someone's check is wrong.

The cost isn't just the hours you burn. It's the overtime you miscalculate, the duplicate day that gets paid twice, the missing-punch that nobody caught, and the "who approved these hours?" question you can't answer when an employee disputes their pay.

This tool replaces the scramble with a clean, enforced flow: employees submit, the app applies your rules and flags what's wrong, a manager approves each timesheet, payroll approves the batch, and you export numbers you can trust - with a record of every approval.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets hourly employees submit their time for the pay period (or lets you import a time CSV from your clock or a spreadsheet).
• Applies your overtime rules automatically - daily and/or weekly thresholds, the right multipliers - and your break/meal rules (auto-deductions or required breaks).
• Handles PTO categories (vacation, sick, holiday) and whether each counts toward overtime.
• Supports multi-rate roles - an employee who works two jobs at two pay rates in one period.
• Flags anomalies for review: impossible days (over 24 hours), missing punches, overlapping entries, totals that don't add up.
• Dedupes on employee + date so the same shift can't be entered or paid twice.
• Routes each timesheet through a manager approval, then a payroll batch approval - a two-gate sign-off before anything is final.
• Exports payroll-ready hours in the exact columns and format your payroll provider expects, plus a complete approval log.

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, each step ending 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 time gets collected today, your exact overtime and break and PTO rules, the real field names in your data, your employee roster and pay rates, your typical and peak headcount, your two-gate approval rules, and your messiest edge cases (split shifts, multi-rate roles, a forgotten clock-out, retroactive corrections after approval). 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 payroll process, 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 and the rules engine.
• The full build: database, login, time submission + CSV import with duplicate guards, the overtime/break/PTO rules engine, the anomaly flagging, the manager and payroll approval screens, and the email reminders.
• The hard two-gate approval lock - manager, then payroll - enforced in code.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your payroll system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a payroll team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see their own organization's data - and employees only see their own timesheets.
• A complete audit trail - every submission, edit, rule applied, flag, approval, and export is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI calculates and flags, but a real manager and real payroll person must review and approve; nothing is ever auto-sent to payroll.
• Two-gate sign-off enforced in code - hours physically cannot reach "payroll-ready" without both the manager and payroll approvals.
• Duplicate guards so the same employee + date can't be processed or paid twice.

Who it's for

Payroll clerks, payroll managers, office managers, and ops/BPM folks who collect and approve hourly time and are tired of doing overtime math in a spreadsheet and chasing people for their hours. If you run payroll for a team of hourly employees - a shop, a restaurant group, a clinic, a warehouse, a field-service crew - and want a real, auditable timesheet tool without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight time-and-attendance platform, this is for you. You don't need to write code. You need your employee list, your rules, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

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