Tuition Reimbursement Requests & Approval

The problem this kills

Your tuition reimbursement benefit lives in a policy PDF and a tangle of email threads. An employee asks "can I get this course covered?", someone digs up the policy, eyeballs whether the program qualifies, guesses at how much budget they have left this year, and replies "looks fine" - or doesn't reply for two weeks. Months later a grade slip and a receipt show up, and now someone has to remember what was approved, check the grade against the minimum, confirm the receipt amount, make sure the annual cap isn't blown, and hand the number to payroll.

Somewhere in there, things slip. Two courses get approved that together exceed the cap. A reimbursement goes out for a "C" when policy required a "B." A receipt covers books and parking that aren't eligible. The repayment-if-you-leave clause never gets recorded, so when someone quits three months later, nobody knows what to claw back. And when finance or an auditor asks "show me how this $5,250 was approved," the answer is scattered across six inboxes.

This tool replaces the inbox guesswork with one clear, enforced process - pre-approve against policy, verify the completion, check the cap, get a real sign-off, and keep a clean record of every dollar.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets an employee request pre-approval for a course before they enroll (program, school, term, estimated cost).
• Checks the request against your policy automatically: is the employee eligible, is the program an eligible type, and does it fit within their remaining annual cap?
• Routes the pre-approval to HR for a real decision before the employee spends a dollar - the AI checks the rules, a person approves.
• After the course, lets the employee submit the grade and the receipt (file upload), and verifies them against your minimum-grade and eligible-cost rules.
• Routes the final reimbursement for approval - HR confirms grade, receipt, and remaining cap before anything is queued.
• Tracks remaining budget per employee per year so the cap is never exceeded.
• Records the repayment clause (e.g., "leave within 12 months and you repay") against each reimbursement, so it's documented if it's ever triggered.
• Dedupes on employee + course + term so the same claim can't be paid twice.
• Exports a clean reimbursement CSV in the exact columns your payroll/AP system expects, plus a full audit log.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how reimbursement works at your company today, what your actual policy says (eligibility, annual cap, eligible programs, minimum grade, repayment clause), the real fields and codes in your roster and payroll exports, your typical and peak volumes, exactly who approves what, and your messiest edge cases (part-time staff, prorated caps, a "B-" that's a judgment call, books vs tuition, someone who quits mid-program). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your policy, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model and the policy-check rules.
• The full build: database, login, the pre-approval request and policy check, the cap tracker, the completion + receipt upload, the verification step, the two human approval gates, the email flow, the audit trail, and the payroll export.
• The hard human-in-the-loop gates and the cap/grade/eligibility rules enforced in code.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to payroll.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls an HR/benefits team actually needs:

• Login so only your team (and your employees) can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see their own organization's data - and employees see only their own requests.
• A complete audit trail - every request, policy check, pre-approval, submission, verification, reimbursement approval, and export is logged with who and when.
• Two hard human-in-the-loop gates - HR approves the course before enrollment, and HR approves the final reimbursement before payroll; the AI drafts and checks, but a person always commits.
• Cap, grade, and eligibility rules enforced in code - a request that blows the annual cap, a grade below your minimum, or an ineligible program physically cannot sail through to payment unflagged.
• Duplicate guards - one claim per employee + course + term, so nothing is reimbursed twice.

A note: this tool documents and enforces your policy. It is not tax advice - reimbursements can have tax implications (in the US, amounts over the IRS limit may be taxable), so the plan keeps payroll as the system of record and just hands them a clean, auditable file.

Who it's for

HR and benefits administrators who run tuition reimbursement off a policy PDF and a string of email approvals - and who want a real, auditable tool that enforces the caps and rules without hiring a developer or buying a heavyweight benefits platform. You don't need to write code. You need your policy, your employee roster, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.