PTO Payout & Expiry Calculator: No More Year-End Use-It-or-Lose-It Surprises

The problem this kills

Every year-end (or whenever your PTO policy year flips), someone in HR or payroll opens a spreadsheet and starts the worst kind of detective work: who has time that's about to vanish, who's sitting over the carryover cap, and who the company is legally or contractually obligated to pay out. Miss a use-it-or-lose-it employee and they lose earned time and you get an angry email. Miss a payout obligation — which varies by policy and by state — and you've got a compliance problem. Fat-finger a payout rate and it's a paycheck error.

It's high-stakes, deadline-driven, and almost always done by hand with VLOOKUPs and sticky notes. The rules are knowable, but they're tangled: remind-to-use is different from must-pay-out, payout rates differ from accrual rates, and "the policy year" doesn't always match the calendar.

This tool turns that annual scramble into an import, a review, and an approve.

What you'll build

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

• Imports current PTO balances for everyone (from a CSV export or a Google Sheet).
• Holds your policy — caps, carryover limits, use-it-or-lose-it rules, payout rules, and how the policy year is defined.
• Flags every balance that is about to expire or over the cap, and separates "just remind them" from "we must pay this out."
• Computes the payout for each affected employee at the correct payout rate (which may differ from their accrual rate).
• Puts the whole list in front of HR to review and approve before a single dollar moves.
• Exports a payroll-ready payout CSV in the exact columns your payroll system expects, and sends reminder emails to use-it-or-lose-it employees.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A copy-paste runbook you hand to an AI coding agent (like Claude Code) that builds the whole thing with you, step by step — no prior coding needed.
• It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes any code, the plan makes the agent ask about your current PTO process, your HR/payroll systems and exports, the exact field names in your data, your real caps and payout rules, how your policy year works, your typical and peak headcount, and your messy edge cases (mid-year hires, leaves of absence, states with mandatory payout). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up — so you get a tool shaped to your policy, not a generic template.
• The full build: data model, balance + policy import, the expiry/over-cap engine, the payout calculator, the HR approval screen, the payroll CSV export, and the reminder emails.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build and use this today even if you can't connect to your HRIS: it reads balances from a Google Sheet and produces a clean payout CSV in your payroll's column layout.
• A plain-English verification checklist so you know it actually works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a loose spreadsheet macro — it's built like a tool that touches payroll should be built:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own employees and balances.
• A complete audit trail: who imported what, who approved which payouts, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI drafts the expiry/over-cap list and the payouts, but nothing is exported to payroll until a person reviews and approves it.
• Duplicate guards keyed on employee + policy year, so the same person can't accidentally be paid out twice in one cycle.

Who it's for

HR and payroll people who own year-end PTO cleanup: enforcing carryover caps, honoring use-it-or-lose-it deadlines, and meeting payout obligations — and who are tired of doing it by hand in a spreadsheet every December.

You don't need to be a developer. If you can describe your PTO policy and paste a prompt, you can build this.

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