Multi-Approver Timesheet Router

The problem this kills

In a small company, timesheet approval is easy: everyone reports to one manager, and that manager says yes. In a larger or matrixed org, it's a maze. Who approves whom changes by department, cost center, and project. Some people genuinely report to two managers and need both to sign off. And the moment one approver goes on vacation, their pile of timesheets quietly freezes - and you find out at the payroll cutoff, when it's already a fire drill.

So payroll spends the last two days of every period playing detective: chasing the right manager, forwarding emails to whoever's covering, and manually re-typing approvals into the system before the run. One missed delegation and someone gets paid late.

This plan builds the tool that does the routing for you - reliably, with a record of every decision - while keeping a human firmly in charge of the actual approval.

What you'll build

A small, private web app for your payroll team that:

• Imports your mapping - the employee-to-approver list, plus delegation and out-of-office rules - from a CSV or Google Sheet.
• Routes every timesheet for the period to the correct approver automatically, using your real department/cost-center/manager logic.
• Handles split approvals - if someone worked across two departments, the timesheet is routed to both managers and is only "done" when both have signed off.
• Auto-delegates around absences - if an approver is marked out of office, their items go to the named backup so nothing stalls, and the handoff is logged.
• Reminds before cutoff - sends approvers a tidy email of what's still waiting on them, on the schedule you set.
• Shows a live status board - approved, pending, delegated, and split-but-half-done, at a glance.
• Exports the fully-approved file in the exact columns your payroll system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A step-by-step runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It does the building; you steer it in plain English.

It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before a single line is written, the plan makes the agent ask how your approvals actually work - your department and cost-center naming, how you identify employees, who your real approvers are, how split-department people are handled, your delegation rules, your cutoff schedule, and the weird exceptions you live with. It reads back a short tailored spec, you give a thumbs-up, and only then does it build a tool shaped to your org - not a generic template that you'd have to bend to fit.

From there it walks through the data model, the import, the routing engine (including splits and delegation), the approval screens, the reminder emails, the audit log, and the final export - each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt. It includes a "No API yet?" fallback so you can run entirely on CSV imports and a CSV export today, with no integration into your timekeeping system required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a script that rubber-stamps timesheets. It's built like a system payroll can trust:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own data.
• A human approval gate - the tool routes, reminds, and drafts, but a real approver (or their named delegate) clicks Approve. Nothing is ever auto-approved.
• A complete audit trail - who approved what and when, and every delegation and reassignment, with a reason and timestamp.
• Duplicate guards so the same timesheet can't be approved twice or exported twice.

Who it's for

Payroll and HR-ops teams in larger or matrixed organizations - where "who approves whom" is genuinely complicated, people report into more than one manager, and approvals get stuck the moment someone takes time off. If you've ever spent the last 48 hours before a pay run chasing signatures, this is for you. No coding background needed.

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