Automated overtime approvals, from weeks to minutes
A custom HR tool that collects overtime approvals from clients and employees on its own. HR sets up the holidays once, and it takes care of the rest.
Around every holiday, two or three people in HR chased 30+ clients and 100+ employees for overtime sign-off, one email at a time. Replies got lost and approvals came late, which delayed payroll, blocked billing and caused disputes.
For a fast-growing BPO, this was a critical bottleneck. To scale, a BPO has to keep hiring and onboarding more people and handle them at scale, and this manual work took HR's time away from recruiting, onboarding and streamlining other processes.
HR raised the problem and the COO forwarded it to me. Before writing code, I worked with HR to agree what each person needs and how every messy case should be handled.
- Clients get a personal link, with no account to create, to review who is on overtime and approve.
- Employees opt in with a simple yes or no, in the channels they already use.
- HR sees and controls everything, and can step in when needed.
The hard part was the edge cases: one employee working for two clients, one client using the same employee across several shifts, and a client changing their mind after approving. We settled each rule up front, clearly and fairly, so relationships on both sides stayed intact.
The budget was a requirement too. As a growing company, they needed their money in their most important resource, their people. So the system had to fit their cost needs, today and in the near future.
Other solutions on the market were too extensive, too expensive and too difficult to operate and integrate, so a lean custom tool was the best option. HR adds holidays two weeks ahead, and a small scheduled job on Google Cloud Run, a tiny addition to the infrastructure the company already had, does the rest. It invites employees, reminds them, sends each client a personal link that expires after 7 days, follows up only with people who did not answer, and exports the approved hours straight into HR's existing workflow.
Durable and reliable, with alerts and monitoring, autoscaling, and tuning that balances processing time against cost.
Custom fit to their needs today and in the near future, and built to be extended as new requirements come.
Proper, detailed documentation left with the company, so they can run it and keep growing it without me.
It saved weeks of HR and employee time, and HR was very appreciative and trusted the system fully.
Why it worked: the system was developed with HR, for HR, and HR was trained on it, all by the same person. That ensured adoption and its success.
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