PTO Carryover & Year-End Processor
Apply your carryover, forfeiture, and payout rules to every PTO balance, preview the result per employee, and roll balances only after HR approves — so the annual rollover is correct and defensible.
A year-end rollover tool that computes carryover, forfeiture, and payout per employee, shows HR a full preview with totals, and only updates balances and queues payouts after an explicit human approval — with a complete audit trail and clean CSVs for your HRIS and payroll.
Before you start
- A current PTO balance list (export or Google Sheet) with an employee ID per row
- Your written carryover / forfeiture / payout policy (caps, eligibility, payout rate)
- Any jurisdiction rules where forfeiture isn't allowed (use-it-or-lose-it bans)
- Free Vercel, Supabase, and Resend accounts
The problem this kills
Every December the PTO rollover lands on someone in HR, and it is never simple. Each plan has its own cap, some balances forfeit, some pay out, a few states or provinces don't allow forfeiture at all, and there's always a cluster of prorated new hires and people on leave who don't fit the formula. So it gets done by hand in a spreadsheet, late at night, under time pressure — and then the disputes start in January. "My balance is wrong." "I should have been paid out." "You forfeited days you weren't allowed to." Without a clear record of which rule was applied to whom, every one of those is a he-said-she-said you can't win.
This tool turns that into a controlled, repeatable process. It loads every balance, applies your exact policy, shows you what's about to happen before anything changes, and keeps a permanent record of the rule applied to each person.
What you'll build
A small internal web app, just for your HR team, that:
- Loads current PTO balances and your carryover / forfeiture / payout policy.
- Computes, per employee, how much carries over (up to your cap), how much forfeits, and how much pays out — at your configured rate.
- Honors jurisdiction rules: where forfeiture is banned, it won't forfeit, and it flags any policy that conflicts with the law.
- Handles the messy cases — prorated new hires, employees on leave — the way you tell it to.
- Shows HR a full preview with grand totals before anything is touched.
- Updates balances and queues payouts to payroll only after a person clicks Approve.
- Exports clean CSVs in the exact columns your HRIS and payroll system expect.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
A step-by-step runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It does the building; you steer.
It opens by interviewing you about your business — your plans, caps, payout rates, jurisdictions, naming conventions, and edge cases — and reflects back a short tailored spec for your thumbs-up. That's the whole point: the tool is shaped to how your PTO actually works, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.
From there it walks through the database, the import, the carryover/forfeiture/payout engine, the preview screen, the approval gate, the audit log, and the CSV exports — each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your HR team can open it.
- Row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data.
- A human-in-the-loop approval gate — the tool drafts the rollover; a person reviews the full preview and approves before a single balance changes or a payout is queued.
- A complete audit trail — who approved what, when, and exactly which rule was applied to each employee.
- Duplicate guards keyed on employee ID + plan year, so a year can never be rolled twice.
Who it's for
HR operations people who dread the December balance rollover and the disputes that follow — and want it correct, fast, and defensible without living in a spreadsheet.
You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.