Pre-Payroll Change Batch & Approval

The problem this kills

Every pay period you turn into a human aggregator. New hires arrive from one form, terminations come over Slack, a manager emails a raise, finance sends a bonus list, benefits drops a deduction change in a spreadsheet, and someone always remembers a correction at 4:58pm on cutoff day. You stitch it all into a message to payroll and pray you didn't miss one, double-enter another, or fat-finger an effective date.

When it goes wrong, it goes wrong on someone's paycheck - which means an upset employee, an off-cycle correction, and a finance question you can't fully answer because the "source" was a thread of emails.

This tool turns that chaos into one trusted handoff: every change for the period lands in a single batch, gets validated and de-duplicated, gets formally approved by the right people, and leaves as a clean file payroll can trust.

What you'll build

A small internal web app where:

• Changes flow in from all your feeders - intake forms, your existing change-request tool, and CSV/Sheet imports - into one batch per pay period.
• Each change is validated against your rules (effective dating, cutoff deadlines, required fields, in-policy comp ranges) and de-duplicated so the same person-change-date can't be entered twice.
• A consolidated batch view shows every change with before/after values and a reconciled count.
• HR reviews and approves; comp changes also require finance sign-off; out-of-policy or unfunded items get flagged and held instead of slipping through.
• On approval, the tool generates the payroll-change file in your payroll system's exact column layout, with a full audit trail of who approved what and when.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your feeders, your real field names and employee-ID format, your change types, your cutoff calendar, your approval matrix, and your messiest edge cases - then tailors the data model, the validation rules, and every build step to your payroll, not a generic template. You confirm a short spec before a single line is built.

From there it walks you, prompt by prompt, through standing up the database, the secure login, the intake and import paths, the validation and de-dupe engine, the consolidated batch and approval gates, the audited export, and a verification pass - each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt for your AI coding agent.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own data.
• A complete audit trail - every entry, edit, approval, and export is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts and consolidates, but nothing becomes a payroll file until HR (and finance, for comp) approves. Out-of-policy and unfunded items are held, not pushed.
• Duplicate guards - a dedupe key of employee ID + change-type + effective date stops the same change from being processed twice.

Who it's for

HR and payroll coordinators who gather changes from a dozen sources each cycle and currently email payroll a hand-built list. If you are the person who reconciles the chaos before every run, this builds you the safety net you've been doing in your head.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.