Bonus Accrual & Payout Approver: Kill the Broken Bonus Spreadsheet

The problem this kills

Every bonus cycle starts the same way: someone opens last year's spreadsheet, the one with thirty tabs and a VLOOKUP that breaks the moment a name doesn't match. They paste in this period's targets and attainment, half the formulas reference the wrong cell, a manager emails their discretionary numbers in a different format than everyone else, and finance has no idea whether the whole thing still fits inside the approved pool until the very end — when it doesn't.

Then comes the approval chase: manager proposes, HR sanity-checks, finance confirms the budget, an exec signs off, and somewhere in that chain a number quietly changes and nobody can say who changed it or why. The bonuses go out, and three weeks later a payroll person finds an employee who got paid twice because they appeared on two tabs. You don't need to be a developer to replace this. You need a tool that does the math the same way every time, refuses to blow the pool, and remembers every approval.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for running a bonus cycle end to end. You load two things: each person's targets and attainment (company goals, individual goals, percent achieved) and your bonus formula or pool rules. The tool computes the formula portion of every person's bonus automatically — the part driven by attainment — so nobody is hand-typing a multiplication. Managers log in and propose the discretionary amount on top, with a reason. As proposals come in, the tool keeps a running total against the approved pool and flags or blocks anything that pushes the run over budget.

The run then moves through layered approval — manager proposes, HR reviews, finance confirms it fits the pool, an exec gives final sign-off — and only a fully approved run can be finalized. At that point the tool exports an approved bonus CSV in the exact columns your payroll provider expects (including the supplemental tax-treatment flag) and generates a per-employee bonus letter you can email out via Resend. No more broken formula, no more pool surprises, no more "who approved this?"

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 — how your bonus cycle works today and who touches it, where targets and attainment live (HRIS, sales CRM, a spreadsheet), exactly what your fields and employee IDs are named, your real formula or pool math, your approval hierarchy and budget rules, your typical and peak headcount, and your messy edge cases (mid-cycle hires, leaves, proration, clawbacks) — and then it tailors the data model, the formula engine, 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 loading targets and attainment, computing each formula bonus, the manager proposal screen, the running pool tracker, the layered approval workflow, and the final export of the bonus CSV and per-employee letters — each step ending with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no API to your HRIS or payroll system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This tool is built around the controls a comp run actually needs:

• Login so only your comp, HR, finance, and exec team can use it.
• Row-level security so a manager only ever sees and proposes for their own people, and one organization's data is never visible to another.
• A complete audit trail — every proposed amount, every edit, every approval and rejection, with who and when — so you can answer "who changed this number?" instantly.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts and computes, but nothing is finalized until each required layer reviews and approves. The AI never finalizes a bonus run on its own.
• Pool enforcement: the run is checked against the approved budget, and overage is blocked or flagged before sign-off — never discovered after payout.
• Duplicate guards keyed on employee + bonus cycle, so the same person can't be paid twice in one run.

Who it's for

HR and compensation teams, and the finance partners who own the budget, who run periodic (annual, semi-annual, quarterly) bonus cycles and are tired of trusting a fragile spreadsheet with real money and real approvals.

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