Missed-Punch Fixer

The problem this kills

Every timesheet deadline starts the same way: you open the punch export and it is full of nonsense. Someone clocked in and never clocked out. Someone clocked in twice in a row. The kiosk says Maria worked a 19-hour shift. Now you are texting people - "Did you actually work until midnight?" - chasing replies, eyeballing the schedule, and hand-editing a spreadsheet you are not allowed to hand-edit. It is the worst hour of the pay period, it is error-prone, and there is no record of who changed what.

The Missed-Punch Fixer turns that morning of chasing into a tidy queue. The tool reads the raw punches, finds the ones that are incomplete or physically impossible, and routes each one to the person who knows the answer - the employee - and then to the person who is allowed to approve it - the manager. Payroll only ever sees corrections that a human reviewed and signed off on.

What you'll build

A small private web app for your payroll and supervisor team:

• Import a punch export (CSV or Google Sheet) from your time clock or kiosk - no integration required.
• Anomaly detection that classifies each problem: orphan clock-in (no out), orphan clock-out (no in), overlapping punches, over-length shift (the 19-hour kind), and under-length versus the schedule.
• Employee correction requests: the employee sees only their own flagged punches and proposes the real time with a short reason.
• Manager approval gate: the manager reviews the explanation and either approves the fix or rejects it. Nothing changes payroll until they approve.
• Corrected punch log that keeps the original raw punch immutable right next to the approved correction - a full before/after audit trail.
• Clean hours CSV in the exact columns your payroll system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A complete, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent (Claude Code). You do not write code - you paste prompts and answer questions.

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before building anything, the plan has the agent ask about your punch export's columns, your shift naming, your over-length and under-length thresholds, who approves what, and your real edge cases - then it tailors the data model, the anomaly rules, and every later step to your answers. This is your tool, not a generic template.
• A step-by-step build, each step ending in a ready-to-copy prompt.
• The full anomaly classifier (orphan in, orphan out, overlap, over-length, under-length).
• Login, per-organization data isolation, audit trail, and the employee-proposes / manager-approves gate built in from the start.
• A "No API yet?" path so the whole thing works straight off your punch CSV today, with zero clock integration.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so an employee sees only their own flagged punches, and one company can never see another's data.
• A complete audit trail: who proposed a correction, who approved or rejected it, with the original raw punch kept immutable beside every change.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the employee proposes, the manager approves, and only approved corrections feed the clean hours export. The AI never silently edits anyone's time.
• Duplicate guards keyed on employee + shift date, so the same punch can't be corrected or exported twice.

Who it's for

Payroll admins and shift supervisors who lose the morning of every timesheet deadline chasing down "did you really work until midnight?" If you live in a punch export and a payroll deadline, this is for you.

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