New-Hire Payroll Setup: Get the First Paycheck Right, Without Chasing a Voided Check

The problem this kills

A new hire starts Monday, and payroll is due Wednesday. You've emailed them three times for a voided check, the W-4 came back half-filled, the address on the offer doesn't match the one they just texted you, and the routing number they sent has nine digits but you're not sure they're the right nine. Somewhere in your inbox is a photo of a Social Security card you really wish wasn't sitting in your inbox.

Every missing field is a delay, and a delayed first paycheck is the fastest way to make a brand-new employee regret saying yes. The information is sensitive, the deadline is hard, and the whole thing is held together by email threads and good intentions.

You don't need to live like this, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it. You can build a secure intake tool that collects everything once, checks it before HR ever sees it, and hands payroll a clean record on the first try.

What you'll build

A small, secure web app where:

• HR sends one secure link to a new hire instead of a chain of "can you also send me..." emails.
• The new hire fills in their own payroll essentials — legal name, address, W-4 withholding, work state, direct-deposit details, start date — on a clean form, from their phone if they want.
• The tool validates as they type: required W-4 fields are present, the work state is real, and the bank routing number passes its built-in checksum (a self-test the number must pass to be valid) before they can submit.
• HR reviews each submission against the offer details (rate, classification, department), sees bank and SSN data masked on screen, and clicks approve only when the record is complete and accurate.
• Approved records export into a provider-ready new-hire CSV — in exactly the columns your payroll system expects — and the onboarding checklist updates to "ready to load."

It runs behind a login, every action is logged, and nobody can write a record into your payroll export until a human has approved it.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a step-by-step runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (like Claude Code). It builds the whole tool with you, one prompt at a time — no prior coding needed.

It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the plan has the agent ask you about your real onboarding process: which payroll provider you use and its exact import columns, how you name departments and classifications, whether you're single-state or multi-state, your typical and peak hiring volume, who approves, and the messy edge cases (mid-period start dates, rehires, salary vs. hourly, employees with no US bank account). Then it reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. The tool you end up with fits your payroll setup — not a generic template.

From there it walks you through:

• Standing up the database with sensitive fields (bank, SSN) encrypted at rest and locked down.
• The secure, tokenized intake link and the new-hire form, with live validation.
• The routing-number checksum and required-field checks.
• The HR review screen with masked-data display and the approval gate.
• The provider-ready CSV export and the onboarding checklist status.
• A verification checklist so you know it actually works — and a no-API fallback so it's fully usable today.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy form. The plan builds in the controls that make a tool trustworthy with real employee data:

• Login, so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security, so people only ever see their own organization's records.
• Sensitive-data protection: bank and SSN data encrypted at rest in Supabase and masked in every screen — you approve a record without exposing the raw numbers.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts and validates, but nothing reaches the payroll export until HR reviews and approves it.
• A complete audit trail: who sent the link, who submitted, who approved, and exactly when.
• Duplicate guards: the same person and start date can't be loaded into payroll twice.

Who it's for

HR onboarding coordinators and small-business owners who set up new employees in payroll and dread the missing-info scramble before the first check. If you've ever chased a voided check by email the night before a payroll run, this one's for you.

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