PTO Accrual & Balance Tracker
Build an internal tool that calculates PTO accruals from your own policy (rates by tenure, frequency, caps, waiting periods), keeps a running balance per employee, and runs a reviewed monthly accrual that HR approves before any balance changes.
Roster and policy loaded, accruals computed for the period with cap and proration handling, proposed balance changes shown for HR review, approval applied, balances updated and fully audited, and a clean CSV export for payroll/HRIS.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account
- Your employee roster (hire date, FTE, leave plan)
- Your written PTO/accrual policy (rates, frequency, caps, carryover, tenure tiers)
- Current balances and usage history (a spreadsheet is fine)
The problem this kills
PTO balances drift. You maintain them by hand in a spreadsheet, copy accrual rates from a policy doc nobody updated, and every payroll cycle someone disputes their balance. Part-timers and mid-month hires get prorated wrong. Caps get missed, so someone "earns" more than the policy allows. Carryover at year end is a guessing game. And when an employee asks "how did I get this number?", you can't show your work.
The mismatches eat hours of reconciliation, and they erode trust - because a wrong PTO balance feels personal.
What you'll build
A small, private web app for your HR and payroll team that computes PTO accruals straight from your policy and keeps an accurate running balance for every employee. Each period (usually monthly), it proposes who earned what, flags who hit a cap, and shows the before/after - and nothing changes until a human approves it. Every accrual, adjustment, and approval is recorded in a permanent ledger, so any balance can be explained line by line. When you're done, you export a clean CSV of balances in exactly the columns your payroll or HRIS expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your accrual rates and tenure tiers, your accrual frequency, your caps and carryover rules, how you prorate part-timers and mid-period hires, your negative-balance rules, and the exact column names your payroll system wants. It reads back a short tailored spec and waits for your thumbs-up. That's the difference between a generic template and a tool that matches your policy - it adapts the data model, the math, and every later step to your answers.
From there it walks you, prompt by prompt, through building the database, the import of your roster and history, the accrual engine, the review-and-approve screen, the audit ledger, and the CSV export. Each step ends with 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 - every accrual, cap hit, and manual adjustment records who did it, when, and why.
- A human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts the accrual run, HR reviews it, and only an approval writes the new balances.
- Duplicate guards keyed on employee ID + accrual period, so a period can never be accrued twice.
- Manual adjustments require a reason and a sign-off before they touch a balance.
Who it's for
HR operations and payroll teams who maintain leave balances by hand and keep reconciling mismatches. If you live in a PTO spreadsheet and dread the monthly accrual, this is for you - no coding background required.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.