Automated Payroll Cuts Hours of Manual Work for a Multi-Location Salon

The business had four distinct pay structures — tiered commission, flat commission, hourly plus commission, and hourly only — each with its own rules and edge cases. Every hour spent on manual spreadsheet calculations and repetitive reporting was an hour not spent on the business. There was no audit trail, no easy way to catch errors, and no visibility into payroll trends over time. As the business grew, the process became unsustainable.

We mapped the full payroll process, identified where manual effort was highest, and built a serverless web application on AWS — Lambda for compute, S3 for storage, and CloudFront with authentication for secure access. The tool integrates with the salon's existing software through CSV upload, applies the correct pay structure to each team member automatically, and generates detailed reports with a complete audit trail. Built-in dashboards connect compensation data to business KPIs, giving ownership clear visibility into labor costs and trends across pay periods.