Leave of Absence Case Tracker
Build a confidential internal tool that tracks every protected and extended leave - type, eligibility, certifications, key dates, and intermittent usage - and never lets a required notice or deadline slip, with HR approving each milestone before anything changes.
A secure, access-controlled leave-case tracker where HR opens a case, collects certifications, drafts deadline-bound notices, approves each milestone, tracks intermittent usage, logs return-to-work, and exports a clean leave-register CSV - with a full audit trail.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account
- Your current leave-tracking spreadsheet (so you can import existing cases)
The problem this kills
Protected and extended leaves are some of the highest-risk work HR does, and most teams run them out of a single sensitive spreadsheet. One tab holds employee names, medical certifications, leave types, and return dates - all mixed together, visible to anyone with the link, and impossible to audit. The deadlines that actually matter (the eligibility notice, the designation notice, the recertification window, the expected return date) live in someone's head or a calendar reminder that gets snoozed.
When a notice goes out late, or a certification expires unnoticed, or an intermittent leave is miscounted, the cost is not just a frustrated employee - it is a compliance miss with real legal exposure. And because the spreadsheet has no record of who approved what and when, you cannot prove you administered the leave correctly even when you did.
This tool replaces that fragile spreadsheet with a confidential, access-controlled case tracker that watches the deadlines for you and forces a human approval at every milestone.
What you'll build
A private internal web app where your HR team can:
- Open a leave case for an employee, capturing leave type, eligibility facts, and key dates.
- Upload and verify certification and supporting documents into secure storage (not email attachments).
- See every required notice and deadline calculated from your own configured rules, with alerts before they come due.
- Track intermittent and reduced-schedule leave usage against an entitlement balance.
- Move a case through its milestones - eligibility determination, approval, extension, return-to-work - where HR reviews and approves each change before status flips or a notice is sent.
- Export a clean leave-register CSV in the exact columns your HRIS or payroll system expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook. Crucially, it opens by interviewing you about your business - your leave types, your jurisdiction's rules and deadlines, the exact fields and IDs in your employee data, your typical and peak case volumes, and your messy edge cases (intermittent leave, leave that stacks on top of another, certifications that arrive late). It reads a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the data model, validations, and every later step around your answers. You are not getting a generic template - you are getting a tool built for how your team actually administers leave.
From there it walks you step by step - each step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt you paste into your AI coding agent - through login, the secure data model, document uploads, the deadline engine, the approval gate, intermittent-usage tracking, the audit trail, and the CSV export. There is also a "No API yet?" path so you can build the whole thing today by importing from a secure spreadsheet, with no integration to your HRIS required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is sensitive medical and personal data, so governance is not optional - it is the whole design:
- Login so only your HR team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so users only ever see cases for their own organization, with extra-tight access on medical fields and documents.
- A complete audit trail - who opened a case, who verified a certification, who approved each milestone, and exactly when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts notices and proposes status changes, but a person reviews and approves before anything is committed or sent. Certifications are verified by a human, never auto-accepted.
- Duplicate guards so the same employee + leave-start can't open two competing cases.
A note: leave laws are jurisdiction-specific and this tool is not legal advice. It applies the rules you configure and tracks the deadlines you set - so you stay in control and on time.
Who it's for
HR business partners and leave administrators who manage FMLA-style, medical, and parental leaves today in a sensitive spreadsheet and know they are one snoozed reminder away from a compliance miss. If you can describe your leave process in plain English, you can build this.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your team.