🛠️Payroll Automation — Timberline Veterinary Hospital

The problem

Timberline's payroll was being calculated cell-by-cell in a spreadsheet — every pay period was a chunk of an admin's day, and small mistakes had real consequences. They didn't want a new system, they wanted the existing system to stop being so painful.

The approach

Rather than build a separate app, I leaned into where the team already worked. I sat down with the owner, walked through a real pay period, and mapped every edge case (PTO, overtime, split shifts, holiday rules) to a small set of rules. Then I built an Apps Script that adds a custom menu inside the sheet, processes hours in bulk, and writes results back to clearly-labelled output cells.

Implementation highlights

• Custom menu (`onOpen`) so non-technical staff trigger the script the same way they'd run any sheet feature.
• Edge-case rules documented inline so they're traceable when the policy changes.
• Defensive validation that flags anomalies instead of silently miscalculating.

Outcome & lessons

Pay-period processing time dropped from hours to seconds, and arithmetic errors essentially went to zero. A great reminder that the highest-leverage automation often slots into the workflow that's already there, not a brand-new product.