Self-serve punch correction for hourly employees

When an employee forgets to clock out, or the app double-punches them, or the site was down when they arrived — the standard resolution path is: employee contacts manager, manager contacts HR admin, admin corrects the punch in the system. Multiple complaints describe exactly this: 'employees must contact a manager to log in time if they forget to clock in or out,' and 'employees need to go to an administrator if they forget to check in or out.' That three-person chain to fix a two-minute mistake is friction that compounds daily across any workforce with regular clock failures.

This problem persists because HR software vendors are cautious about giving employees write access to their own time records — the compliance risk of an employee editing their own hours is real, and vendors take the conservative position of requiring manager approval for any change. But the result is that the approval workflow is buried inside the same system that's already failing people, so corrections pile up, managers forget, and payroll closes with errors.

What's broken specifically: there's no lightweight, mobile-native way for an employee to submit a punch correction request with a timestamp and a note, routed to their manager as a simple approve/deny action — separate from the main HR system that's already unreliable. The correction process requires navigating the same ADP interface that already frustrated the employee, which is why many just don't bother and the punch stays wrong.

This is a business because punch correction requests are not a one-time event — they happen every pay period, across every shift-based workforce, and they multiply with headcount. A manager approving corrections individually inside a clunky system is a recurring time tax. The buyer is an HR admin or operations director who currently fields these requests by email or Slack, tracks them in a spreadsheet, and then manually enters them before payroll closes. That workflow exists at almost every company using ADP for hourly time tracking, and it costs roughly the same amount of time every two weeks forever.

What to build

Build a mobile-first punch correction request flow — employees submit a missed or wrong punch with a timestamp, reason, and optional photo evidence, the direct manager gets a push notification to approve or deny in one tap, and approved corrections are written back to ADP Workforce Now via API before payroll close, with a full audit log exportable to CSV.

Where to start

Sign the first 10 customers through payroll processing consultants and ADP implementation partners who already hear this complaint from every client they onboard — they can introduce you at the moment the client is most frustrated with the standard correction workflow, right after their first messy payroll close.

The hard part

ADP's partner API has rate limits and change restrictions that may require corrections to be submitted as manual adjustments rather than direct punch edits, which means the audit trail lives outside ADP and you have to convince a compliance-conscious HR admin to trust a third-party record during a wage dispute.

How it makes money

Flat monthly fee per company based on employee count — roughly $99/month for up to 100 employees, $249/month for up to 500 — since the time savings scale with headcount and the buyer thinks in terms of payroll cycles, not per-seat costs.