Piece-Rate / Incentive Pay Calculator
Turn verified production counts and a rate table into accurate, dispute-proof incentive pay - with a supervisor count-check and a payroll approval gate before anything reaches payroll.
A private internal tool that imports operator production counts and your piece/incentive rate table, computes pay per operator (with scrap deductions and minimum-guarantee rules), routes it through a supervisor count-check and a payroll approval, and exports a payroll-ready CSV plus a pay statement per operator.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account
- Your production counts and rate table as a CSV or Google Sheet
The problem this kills
Incentive pay lives in a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet is a grievance waiting to happen. One mistyped rate, one operator's count pasted into the wrong row, one count that got paid twice across two periods, and suddenly someone's paycheck is wrong. On the shop floor, wrong pay is not a rounding error - it is a trust problem. It triggers disputes, union grievances, and hours of finance backtracking to figure out what happened and who signed off.
The root issue is that the spreadsheet has no memory and no gate. Nobody verified the counts were real good quantity. Nobody approved the math before it hit payroll. And nothing stopped the same operator-operation-period count from being processed twice. When the numbers are challenged, there is no record of who did what.
This tool replaces that fragile spreadsheet with a system that checks the math, remembers every action, and refuses to pay the same count twice.
What you'll build
A small private web app your payroll, supervisor, and finance team log into. You import production counts (good quantity by operator and operation) and your piece/incentive rate table for a pay period. The tool computes incentive or piece pay per operator - applying your scrap deductions and any minimum-guarantee rule - and shows the result. A supervisor verifies the counts are correct. A payroll lead reviews and approves the calculated pay. Only then does the tool produce a payroll-ready CSV in the exact columns your payroll system expects, plus a clean pay statement for each operator.
No connection to your ERP or time system required to start: you import a CSV or Google Sheet and export a CSV. If you wire up an integration later, the workflow does not change.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), which then builds the tool with you step by step - no coding experience needed.
It opens by interviewing you about your business - your operations and rate naming, how scrap and minimums work for you, your period definitions, your peak volumes, and your messiest exceptions - so the tool is tailored to how you actually pay people, not a generic template. The agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before building anything.
From there it walks through importing your counts and rates, computing pay with your rules, the supervisor count-check, the payroll approval gate, the audit trail, the duplicate guard, and the final payroll CSV and per-operator pay statements - each step ending 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 each plant or organization only ever sees its own data.
- A complete audit trail - who imported, who verified counts, who approved, and exactly when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts the pay, a supervisor verifies the counts, a payroll lead approves, and only then is the payroll export produced. Nothing reaches payroll on autopilot.
- Duplicate guards keyed on operator + operation + period, so the same count can never be paid twice.
Who it's for
Payroll and HR coordinators, shop-floor supervisors, and finance teams at any manufacturer that pays piece-rate or efficiency-based incentives and is tired of the spreadsheet causing disputes.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent build it with you.