Timesheet Reminder Nudger

The problem this kills

Every pay period, the same ritual: the payroll admin opens the roster, cross-checks who has and hasn't submitted, and starts DM-ing people one by one. "Your timesheet is late." "Reminder, cutoff is Friday." "Can you approve your team's hours today?" Then a second round. Then a third, near cutoff, in a mild panic. It eats hours, it's easy to miss someone, and the admin becomes a human reminder service instead of doing actual payroll work.

The annoying part is that none of it requires judgment until the very end. Knowing who is late is just arithmetic against the calendar. The only real decision is what to do about the stragglers at cutoff. This tool does the arithmetic and the nagging for you, and saves the human for the one moment that actually needs a human.

What you'll build

A small, private web app that:

• Knows your payroll calendar (cutoff dates) and reads your roster with submission status and your approver list with approval status.
• Figures out, for the current period, exactly who hasn't submitted and which managers haven't approved.
• Sends tiered reminder emails that get firmer as cutoff approaches, while respecting a quiet-hours / send-window setting so nobody gets pinged at 11pm.
• Dedupes so each person gets at most one reminder per stage, never a barrage.
• Near cutoff, builds an escalation list of who is still outstanding and lets the payroll admin review it and decide who to escalate to a skip-level manager or hold the run for. The tool drafts; the admin sends.
• Tracks who was actually late so you get a clean period-end report, and a satisfying "all-in" confirmation when everyone's in.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A first-run discovery interview: before it builds anything, the plan has the AI agent interview you about your pay periods, your roster fields, how submission and approval status are tracked today, your reminder cadence, and your messy exceptions. It reflects a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, so the tool is tailored to your payroll rhythm, not a generic template.
• A step-by-step build with a ready-to-paste prompt at the end of every step.
• The data model for periods, people, statuses, and the reminder log, shaped by your interview answers.
• The tiered-reminder engine with quiet-hours and dedupe baked in.
• The admin escalation review screen and the human approval gate.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can run the whole thing today by updating a status CSV / Google Sheet, with a clean CSV export in the columns your payroll system expects.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's roster and periods.
• A complete audit trail: every reminder sent, every escalation, every status change, with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate at cutoff: the tool drafts the escalation list, but a person reviews and approves before anything is escalated or the run is held.
• Duplicate guards so the same person can't be reminded twice for the same stage, and the same period can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

Payroll admins and office managers who lose hours every period chasing people for timesheets and approvals. If your pay run regularly stalls because three people forgot to submit and one manager is on vacation, this is for you. You don't need to be a developer; you need your calendar, your roster, and an afternoon.

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