Employee Referral Bonus Tracker

The problem this kills

Your employee referral program runs on goodwill and memory. Someone refers a friend, the friend gets hired, and the bonus is supposed to pay out in two pieces - half on the start date, half at 90 days. Then real life happens: the recruiter who promised it leaves, the spreadsheet doesn't get updated, the 90-day mark slips past, and three months later you get an awkward Slack message: "Hey, was I ever going to get that referral bonus?"

Forgotten referral bonuses are one of the quietest morale killers in any company. They make a generous program feel like a broken promise. And the manual workarounds - a shared spreadsheet, a recurring calendar reminder, a sticky note - all fall apart the moment volume picks up or someone goes on vacation.

This plan kills that. It turns your referral program into a tool that watches the clock for you, checks eligibility before money moves, and keeps a clean record of every promise and every payout.

What you'll build

A small, private web app - just for your HR and recruiting team - that:

• Logs each referral: who referred whom, when, and for what role.
• On hire, automatically schedules the bonus milestones from a schedule you define (for example, 50% at start date, 50% at 90 days - or whatever your policy says).
• Sends a milestone-due alert when a payout date arrives.
• Makes HR verify eligibility - is the hire still employed? Is the referrer still here? - before anything pays.
• Routes each payout through a human approval gate, then produces a payroll-ready CSV in your provider's column format and a friendly notification email to the referrer.
• Handles the messy cases: the hire who leaves before a milestone (forfeit), referrers who have since left, and the rule that one referred hire gets exactly one bonus schedule (no double-paying).

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding assistant). It builds the whole tool step by step, and each step ends with a copy-paste prompt - you don't write any code yourself.

Crucially, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the AI asks how your referral program actually works - your bonus amounts and milestone schedule, your eligibility rules, the exact columns your payroll provider expects, your typical and peak hiring volumes, and the edge cases you've run into. Then it reads back a short tailored spec, you approve it, and it builds the tool around your program - not a generic template that you'd have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find: the discovery interview, the data model, the milestone scheduler, the alerts, the eligibility-and-approval workflow, the payroll CSV export, the referrer notification, and a verification checklist so you know it actually works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

A tool that moves money toward payroll has to be trustworthy. This one builds in, every time:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own referrals and payouts.
• A complete audit trail - who logged the referral, who verified eligibility, who approved the payout, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts each payout, a person confirms the hire is still eligible and approves, and only then does it produce the payroll export. The AI never pays anyone on its own.
• Duplicate guards so the same referred hire can't be set up twice or paid twice.

Who it's for

HR and recruiting teams running an employee referral program out of a spreadsheet, an inbox, and a lot of memory - especially anyone who has ever had to apologize for a missed referral bonus. If you can fill out a form, you can run this. No coding experience required.

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