Employee Change Request Workflow

The problem this kills

A manager pings you: "Hey, can we bump Jordan to Senior and move them under Priya, effective next month?" Another asks for a 9% raise that quietly sits above the band. Someone changes a title in a spreadsheet, payroll never hears about it, and now the paycheck and the org chart disagree. People-data changes - promotions, transfers, manager swaps, title and department changes, comp adjustments, status changes - happen all day, in Slack and hallway conversations, and the "record" is a tangle of messages nobody can audit.

The damage shows up later: payroll surprises, comp that drifted out of band because nobody checked, a transfer that finance never approved, a status change that should have been a multi-person decision but was one person's reply. And when an auditor or your CFO asks "who approved this raise, and when?" - you're scrolling through DMs.

This tool replaces the Slack-message free-for-all with a controlled, validated, fully-approved change record - one that's ready to hand to your HRIS and payroll, and that proves exactly who approved what.

What you'll build

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

• Lets HR or a manager open a change request against a real employee record (pulled from your roster), choosing the change type (promotion, transfer, manager change, title/department change, comp change, status change).
• Captures the change as a clean before / after snapshot - what the field is now, what it would become, and the effective date.
• Validates the change against your rules: comp changes checked against the salary band for the new role, title/level rules, required fields per change type, and an effective date that makes sense.
• Routes the request through the right approval chain in order - typically manager, then HRBP, and finance for comp changes - based on your approval matrix and the change type and amount.
• Flags out-of-policy changes (above band, unusually large jump) for an extra layer of review instead of letting them slip.
• Emails each approver their turn via Resend, with reminders when a request stalls.
• Commits only fully-approved changes with their effective date, keeping the before/after snapshot.
• Dedupes on employee ID + change type + effective date, so the same change can't be entered twice.
• Exports a clean change record CSV in the exact columns your HRIS / payroll change form expects, plus a full 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 people-changes happen today, your real change types and the fields each one needs, your exact approval matrix (who signs off, in what order, and when finance gets pulled in), your salary bands and policy rules, the field names and ID/code conventions in your employee data, your volumes, and your messiest edge cases (retro-dated changes, dual reporting lines, mid-cycle promotions, an employee on leave). 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 people process, not a generic HR template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, the change-request form per change type, the validation + band guardrails, the ordered approval chain, the email + reminder flow, the commit-with-effective-date step, and the exports.
• The hard human approval gate and the out-of-policy flagging.
• 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 HRIS.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a people-data process actually needs:

• Login so only your HR, manager, and finance team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the change requests that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every request, validation result, approval, return, edit, and commit is logged with who and when, with before/after snapshots preserved.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI drafts and validates, but real approvers must sign off in order; nothing is ever committed automatically.
• Required sign-offs enforced in code - a comp change physically cannot reach "committed" without finance's approval; an out-of-band change is flagged for extra review.
• Duplicate guards so the same change (employee + change type + effective date) can't be entered twice.

Who it's for

HR operations, people managers, HRBPs, and finance partners who process employee changes informally - over Slack, email, and shared sheets - and keep ending up with mismatched records and payroll surprises. If you want a real, auditable change workflow that respects your bands and approval rules, without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight HRIS module, this is for you. You don't need to write code. You need your employee roster, your change-type and approval rules, your bands, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

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