Timesheet Submission & Approval
Build an internal tool where hourly employees submit hours per pay period, the app catches the bad entries automatically, and managers approve before anything reaches payroll - no more paper sheets or last-minute corrections.
Employees submit hours, validations flag overtime, overlaps, and missing days, managers review and approve or return, approved hours lock and audit, and you export a payroll-ready CSV.
Before you start
- An employee roster with pay rates and schedules
- Your pay-period start/end dates
- Project or cost-code definitions (only if you use them)
- Free Vercel, Supabase, and Resend accounts
The problem this kills
Hourly time tracking on paper and spreadsheets is a slow-motion mess. Sheets come in late, half-filled, or with a shift logged as 25 hours. Someone has to chase corrections by email, eyeball the math, and retype it all into payroll the night before the run. Overtime gets missed or overpaid. Nobody can tell you who approved what, or when.
The damage is real: payroll errors, grumpy employees, compliance exposure, and a manager who loses a half-day every pay period playing detective.
What you'll build
A clean internal web app where your hourly team submits hours for each pay period, the tool checks the work the moment it's entered, and managers approve before a single number touches payroll.
- Employees log hours per day (and per project/cost code if you use them).
- The app instantly flags the messy stuff: more than 24 hours in a day, shifts that overlap, missing days, totals over a weekly threshold, and your own meal/break rules.
- It splits regular vs. overtime hours using your rules and your rounding.
- Managers see each timesheet with every warning highlighted, then approve or return it with a note.
- Approved hours lock. Any edit after approval forces re-approval - no quiet changes.
- One click produces a payroll-ready CSV in exactly the columns your payroll system expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a full runbook you paste into Claude Code. It opens by interviewing you about your business - your pay periods, your overtime and break rules, your roster fields, your project codes, your rounding, and your weird edge cases - then it tailors the data model, the validations, and every build step to your answers. You're not getting a generic template; you're getting the tool your team actually needs.
From there it walks you step by step: set up the database with row-level security, build the employee submission screen, wire up the validations, build the manager review-and-approve gate, lock approved timesheets, record a full audit trail, and produce the payroll CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls that make a tool safe to run payroll off of:
- Login so only your team can use it.
- Row-level security so employees see only their own timesheets and managers see only their team's.
- A human approval gate - the app validates and drafts, but a manager must approve before any hours are exported. Nothing reaches payroll unreviewed.
- A complete audit trail - who submitted, who approved, who returned, what changed, and exactly when.
- Duplicate guards - one timesheet per employee per pay period, enforced, so the same hours can't sneak through twice.
- Lock-after-approval - edits to an approved timesheet reset it and require re-approval.
Who it's for
Managers and payroll teams at companies that track hourly time on paper or spreadsheets and are tired of the chase. If you can describe your pay rules in plain English, you can build this.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your shop.