Sick-Leave Accrual Compliance Tracker: Stay Legal in Every City and State

The problem this kills

Paid sick leave isn't one law — it's dozens. A workforce spread across states and cities means a different accrual rate, a different annual cap, a different carryover rule, and a different usage waiting period for almost every group of employees. Someone in HR ends up maintaining a sprawling spreadsheet that tries to apply New York's rules to the New York staff, California's to the California staff, Seattle's and Chicago's and Colorado's to everyone else — and then recompute every balance each pay period without making a mistake that turns into a penalty, a back-pay claim, or an audit finding.

It's tedious, it's error-prone, and the stakes are real: under-accrue and you've shorted an employee a legally mandated benefit; over-accrue and you've quietly created a liability; miss a carryover or a frontload rule and you're out of compliance in a jurisdiction you didn't even realize you'd crossed into. You don't need to be a developer to put this on rails.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You import three things: your employee roster (each person's work location and hours), a jurisdiction-rules table (accrual rate, annual cap, carryover, frontload-vs-accrue, usage waiting period), and your current sick balances and usage. For each employee, the tool looks up the rules for their work location, computes the right accrual for the period (whether that's hours-worked-based accrual or an annual frontload), applies the cap and carryover, and tracks usage against the balance. It shows HR a proposed accrual run — every change, side by side with the old balance — plus a list of compliance flags: employees with no matching jurisdiction rule, balances over a legal cap, missing carryover, accrual that looks off. HR reviews, fixes, and clicks Approve. Only then do balances update, and any manual adjustment requires a reason. Finally, you export a clean CSV in the exact columns your payroll system or HRIS expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which jurisdictions your people actually work in, how your roster and balance columns are named, whether each location accrues by hours worked or frontloads a lump sum, your exact caps and carryover and waiting-period rules, your typical and peak headcount, and your messy edge cases (remote workers, mid-period transfers, rehires) — and then it tailors the data model, the accrual math, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the imports, the per-jurisdiction accrual engine, the compliance-flag checks, the HR review-and-approve screen, the balance update with audit trail, and the payroll/HRIS CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today from Google Sheets, with no integration to your HRIS.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real HR/payroll tooling, so it ships with the controls a compliance-minded team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's employees, a complete audit trail of who ran which accrual, what changed, and who approved it, a hard human-approval gate so no balance is ever written until HR signs off (and every manual override needs a reason), and duplicate guards keyed on employee ID + accrual period so the same period can't be accrued twice. Compliance gaps — an employee with no matching rule, a balance over a jurisdiction's cap — are surfaced as flags that block approval, not silently waved through.

Who it's for

HR generalists, payroll leads, and people-ops managers at companies with employees across multiple states or cities, each with its own sick-leave mandate. If you can describe how each location's rules work, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your first reviewed accrual run take shape the same afternoon.