Intake Acknowledgement & SLA Tracker: Nothing Falls Silent Again

The problem this kills

A request comes in — a service ticket, an IT access request, a vendor onboarding form, a customer complaint — and then nothing happens. Nobody acknowledged it. Nobody triaged it. It sits in an inbox or a queue while the requester wonders if anyone is even reading it, and your SLA quietly burns down in the background.

By the time someone notices, you've already breached. The requester is annoyed, your team looks unresponsive, and the post-mortem is the same every time: "we just didn't see it in time." The information you needed to catch it — when did this arrive, what's its target response time, how much time is left — was scattered across a spreadsheet, a ticketing tool, and somebody's memory.

You don't need a six-figure ITSM platform to fix this. You need a simple tool that knows when each request arrived, knows the SLA for its type, counts down the clock correctly (business hours, not 3 a.m. on a Sunday), and puts the items about to slip in front of a human in time to do something about it. You can build that this afternoon, without being a developer.

What you'll build

A small, private web app for your team that:

• Imports your incoming requests from a CSV or Google Sheet — each with a request ID, type, requester email, and a received timestamp.
• Computes an SLA clock for every request based on your rules per request type, and correctly handles business hours vs. calendar hours so the clock only ticks when your team is actually open.
• Shows a live triage board of what's on track, what's at risk, and what's already breached, with time remaining shown per request.
• Drafts the acknowledgement or escalation message for the items that need one — but never sends on its own.
• Puts a coordinator in the approval seat: they review the at-risk and breached list, edit or approve each message, and only then does the tool email the requester (or escalate internally) via Resend.
• Logs every action and exports a clean status CSV in the exact columns your system of record expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into an AI coding agent (like Claude Code). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, with a ready-to-copy prompt at the end of each step.

Crucially, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business — your request types, how your SLAs are defined, your actual working hours and holidays, the real column names in your intake sheet, your typical and peak request volume, and your messy edge cases (paused clocks, "waiting on customer," weekend severities). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. You get a tool shaped around how you actually intake work — not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a script that blasts emails. It's a controlled tool built for an accountable owner:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's requests.
• A complete audit trail — who acknowledged or escalated what, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI drafts the acknowledgement or escalation, a coordinator reviews and approves, and only then does anything go out or get written down.
• Duplicate guards keyed on the request ID, so the same request can't be acknowledged or escalated twice.

Who it's for

PMO leads, service-desk and help-desk owners, and ops coordinators who are personally accountable for responsiveness — anyone whose job is to make sure no incoming request goes silent past its promised response time.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.