Payroll & Accounting Automation With Human Approval

The problem

Payroll inputs for a large multi-site team came from timesheets, adjustment emails and a separate contractor workflow, all compiled by hand into the payroll platform each cycle: slow, stressful, and one typo away from paying someone wrongly.

What we did

We built a controlled payroll-entry workflow: inputs normalized into one row per employee, matched to payroll records on stable identifiers, validated and flagged into a review table, and only after the administrator approves are hours and earnings written to unprocessed checks through the official payroll API, then read back and verified entry by entry. The workflow can prepare payroll; it can never submit it.

What we connected

• The payroll platform's official API
• Timesheet & scheduling exports
• Google Sheets review tables
• Gmail notifications
• n8n
• The existing contractor-pay workflow

What we automated

• Input normalization and employee matching
• Validation with missing-and-invalid flagging
• A review-and-approve table before any write
• Earnings written via the official API, then verified
• Run logs and exception reports every cycle

Reliability & controls

• Idempotency: a retry can never double-pay
• Pre-write validation and existing-entry checks
• Post-write verification against the API
• No automatic submission, ever, by design