Overtime Early-Warning

The problem this kills

Overtime almost never shows up as a decision. It shows up on Friday's payroll run, after the hours are already worked and the money is already spent. By then there is nothing a manager can do but sign off and explain the budget overage.

The maddening part is that most of it was preventable. Somebody was at 36 hours on Wednesday with two more shifts on the schedule. A five-minute tweak - swap a shift, send someone home twenty minutes early, move a task to a part-timer - would have kept them under the line. Nobody saw it coming because nobody was adding up hours-worked-so-far plus hours-still-scheduled in real time. That math lives in a punch export and a separate schedule, and no human has time to reconcile them daily across a whole team.

This tool does that reconciliation for you, every morning, and puts the at-risk people in front of the manager while there is still time to act.

What you'll build

A small, private web app and a daily email that together do one job: warn you before overtime happens.

• Import your daily punch/hours export and your published schedule for the rest of the week (CSV or Google Sheet - no integration required).
• Project each person's weekly hours: hours already worked + hours still scheduled, against your overtime rules.
• Produce an OT-risk list that shows, per employee, how many hours they are to the threshold (or already past it) and which upcoming shift tips them over.
• Send managers a daily early-warning email with that list - deduped so the same person never hits the same manager's inbox twice in a day.
• Give the manager a decision gate: review the at-risk list and log a choice - approve the OT or adjust (cut/swap a shift). The tool never edits a schedule itself; it flags and records, you decide.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It builds the whole tool with you, step by step, and every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before writing a line of code, the plan has the agent ask about your current process, the exact columns and employee-ID format in your punch and schedule exports, your typical and peak headcount, and your specific overtime rules - then it reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up. You get a tool shaped to how you actually track hours, not a generic template that assumes a 40-hour-flat world.
• Support for both weekly OT (over 40/week) and daily OT (over 8/day) rules, plus a configurable workweek start day.
• The full hours-projection math, the at-risk ranking, and the daily email build.
• The decision log (approve OT / adjust) that doubles as your audit trail.
• A complete "No API yet?" fallback that runs entirely off your punch + schedule CSVs and exports clean results - so you can ship today without touching your scheduling system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is an internal payroll-adjacent tool, so the plan bakes in the controls from the start:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each manager sees only their own location's people - never the whole company.
• A complete audit trail: who reviewed which at-risk list, what they decided, and when.
• A human-in-the-loop gate: the tool projects and flags, but a manager must explicitly approve OT or log an adjustment. Nothing about pay or schedule is ever changed automatically.
• Duplicate guards so re-importing the same punch file, or the daily email running twice, can't double-count hours or double-alert.

Who it's for

Store and branch managers, shift leads, and labor-budget owners who keep getting blindsided by overtime they could have prevented with a small schedule tweak. If you live in spreadsheets and have never written code, this is built for you.

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