Retirement Contribution Change Requests
Build an internal tool that collects employee 401(k)/retirement contribution change requests, checks them against plan and IRS limits and your allowed effective pay dates, and routes each one for admin approval before it's exported to payroll - so nothing is missed, mis-dated, or over the limit.
A login-protected web tool where employees submit contribution changes, the system validates them against limits and allowed effective dates, an admin reviews and approves, and approved changes export as a clean payroll/recordkeeper CSV - all audited.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account
- Your plan rules (min/max rate, annual limit, catch-up, change frequency)
- Your pay-period calendar (effective-date cutoffs)
The problem this kills
Right now, retirement contribution changes probably arrive as emails, hallway requests, and one-off forms. You re-key them into payroll or the recordkeeper portal, and you're the only thing standing between a clean change and an expensive mistake: someone asks to go over the annual limit, picks an effective date that already passed, flips between Roth and pre-tax mid-period, or submits the same change twice. Miss the pay-period cutoff and the change lands a paycheck late - which means a correction, an apology, and sometimes a refund.
This tool turns that mess into a controlled pipeline. Every request comes in the same way, gets checked against your real rules the moment it's submitted, and waits in a queue for you to approve before anything touches payroll.
What you'll build
A small, private web app for your team:
- A clean change-request form for employees: new rate or dollar amount, pre-tax / Roth split, and a chosen effective date.
- Automatic validation the instant they submit - against your plan's minimum and maximum, the annual contribution and catch-up limits, your allowed change frequency, and your pay-period cutoff calendar.
- An admin review queue where you see each request, why it passed or got flagged, approve or reject it, and only then mark it ready.
- A payroll/recordkeeper CSV export in exactly the columns your system expects.
- A full audit trail and duplicate guard so the same change can't sneak through twice.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a step-by-step runbook you paste into Claude Code (an AI coding agent). It does the building; you answer questions and click approve.
It opens by interviewing you about your business - your plan rules, your data and ID conventions, your pay calendar, your approval steps, and your weird edge cases - then reads back a short tailored spec for your thumbs-up. That's the whole point: you get a tool shaped to your plan and payroll system, not a generic template you have to fight.
From there it walks through database setup, login, the employee form, the validation rules, the admin approval queue, email notifications, the audit log, and the CSV export - each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's data.
- A complete audit trail: who submitted, who approved, what changed, and when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the system drafts and validates, but nothing exports to payroll until a person reviews and approves.
- Duplicate guards keyed on employee ID + effective date, so one active change per period.
This is not financial or tax advice - the tool enforces your configured plan and statutory limits; it doesn't give employees retirement guidance.
Who it's for
Benefits and payroll admins who handle contribution-change requests by hand today and carry the risk of a missed limit, a wrong effective date, or a duplicate slipping into payroll. If that's you, this replaces the email shuffle with a calm, auditable queue.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.