Project Time Allocation: Split Approved Hours Across Jobs Without the Spreadsheet Fights
Let employees split their approved weekly hours across projects, clients, or cost codes, hard-block any allocation that doesn't reconcile to hours worked, and have a manager approve before two clean exports feed payroll and job costing.
A web tool where employees split their approved weekly hours across projects and cost codes, the tool hard-blocks any split that doesn't reconcile to hours worked, a manager reviews and approves the locked allocation, and it exports two clean files — payroll hours and job-cost hours — in the exact columns your systems expect.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your approved weekly hours per employee (CSV or export)
- Your active project / cost-code list
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Your people get paid by the hour, but finance also needs those hours coded to jobs — by project, by client, by cost code — so you can bill clients, cost a job, or report against a grant. So every week the same dance happens: someone exports approved timesheet hours, emails a spreadsheet around, and asks everyone to "remember" how their week split across projects. The numbers come back not adding up — 38 hours worked, 41 hours allocated — and a manager spends Friday chasing the missing three hours instead of approving anything.
Then it gets coded into two different systems by hand: payroll one way, job costing another. They drift apart. A client gets billed for hours payroll never paid, or a job looks under budget because three hours quietly went missing. You don't need to be a developer to put a stop to this.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool. You import two things: each employee's approved weekly hours (the number payroll already signed off on) and your active project / cost-code list. Each employee opens their week and splits their hours across the projects they worked — 12 on the Acme build, 8 on the city contract, 18 on internal. The tool does the math live and will not let them submit unless the allocation reconciles exactly to hours worked — allocated must equal approved, to the minute. Overtime follows the split rule you choose.
Allocations stay editable until a manager locks them. The manager opens a clean review screen, sees every employee's split tie out to their approved hours, and clicks Approve. On approval — and only then — the tool produces two clean exports: a payroll hours file in your payroll system's columns, and a job-cost hours file in your billing / job-costing system's columns. Same hours, two destinations, guaranteed to agree.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how your week and pay periods are defined, exactly what your hours export and project list columns are named, how you key projects and cost codes, how you handle overtime, your typical and peak headcount, and your messy edge cases (multi-week projects, employees on no projects, locked-then-reopened weeks) — and then it tailors the data model, the reconciliation rule, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reads a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the two imports, the employee allocation screen with the live reconciliation hard-block, the manager review-and-approve gate, and the two clean exports — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today with no integration at all.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This touches both payroll and client billing, so it ships with the controls those owners need: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's data (and employees see only their own week), a complete audit trail of who allocated, edited, approved, and exported and when, a hard human-in-the-loop approval gate so nothing reaches payroll or job costing until a manager signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on employee + week so the same week can't be allocated or exported twice. The reconciliation hard-block is itself a control: an allocation that doesn't tie out literally cannot be submitted.
Who it's for
Agencies, professional-services firms, construction and trades shops, and grant-funded organizations — anyone who pays by the hour but also has to code those hours to jobs. If you can describe how a week's hours should split across your projects, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll watch a week's hours tie out and split cleanly the same afternoon.