Month-End Payroll Accrual
Build an internal tool that catches the wages and burden earned in the closing month but paid next month, computes the prorated accrual, drafts the journal entry plus its auto-reversal, and routes both for the controller's approval before they hit the GL.
A logged-in, approval-gated tool that identifies the days of a straddling pay period that fall in the closing month, prorates wages and burden into that month, builds an accrual journal entry and its next-period reversal, and exports both as clean GL-ready CSVs only after the controller approves.
Before you start
- A free Supabase account
- A free Vercel account
- A free Resend account
- Your pay-period calendar and a sample hours/wages export (CSV or Google Sheet)
- Your current burden rate (or the components you build it from)
The problem this kills
A pay period rarely lines up neatly with the calendar month. When a period runs from, say, the 27th to the 10th, part of those wages were earned in the month you're closing but won't be paid until next month. If you don't accrue them, your P&L understates labor in the closing month and overstates it next month. Your numbers are wrong in both periods.
So every month-end, someone opens a spreadsheet, counts the workdays that fall in the closing month, prorates the gross wages, layers on the burden (employer taxes, benefits, the loaded cost of labor), keys an accrual journal entry, and then has to remember to reverse it next period so it doesn't double-count. It is fiddly, it is manual, and a fat-finger in the proration or a forgotten reversal quietly corrupts two months of financials.
What you'll build
A small web app your accounting team logs into. You give it the pay-period dates, the hours/wages for the period, and your burden rate. It figures out exactly which days land in the closing month, prorates the wages and burden into that month, and drafts a balanced accrual journal entry plus its automatic first-of-next-month reversal. The controller reviews the math on screen, approves, and only then does the tool produce two clean CSVs - the accrual entry and the reversal - in the exact column layout your GL import expects.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
- It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the plan has the AI agent ask about your pay calendar, your proration convention (calendar days vs. workdays), your burden components, your GL account numbers, and your messy edge cases - then it tailors the data model and every calculation to your answers instead of dropping a generic template on you.
- A clear, step-by-step build: data model, the proration engine, the burden calc, the accrual + auto-reversal pair, the approval screen, and the CSV exporters.
- The full governance layer (login, row-level security, audit trail, approval gate, duplicate guard) wired in from the start.
- A ready-to-paste prompt at the end of every step.
- A "No API yet?" fallback so you can run the whole thing today off a CSV or Google Sheet, with no integration to your payroll or accounting system required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your accounting team can open it.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own payroll data.
- A complete audit trail - who computed an accrual, who approved it, and exactly when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts the journal and reversal, the controller reviews and approves, and only then is anything exported toward the GL. The AI never posts on its own.
- A duplicate guard keyed on the pay period plus the month-end date, so the same accrual can't be booked twice.
Who it's for
Controllers and accountants closing the books who have to accrue payroll that straddles a month-end - anyone who's been counting workdays in a spreadsheet at 9pm on the last day of the month and praying they remembered the reversal.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.