Smartclocksystems

The problem

3 years ago I watched a paper timesheet cause chaos and distrust between a manager and an employee. Smartclocksystems was built from that exact experience.

So the goal was never just "a time clock". It was time records nobody has to take on trust: not the employee, not the manager, not an auditor.

What it does

• GPS-verified punch ledger, cryptographically chained
• Full role & permissions rebuild across tenants
• 1099 direct deposit via Gusto
• AI governance dashboard for compliance
• Kiosks, geofencing & scheduling
• Native iOS/Android apps in progress

How I built it

• A tamper-evident punch ledger. Every clock-in and clock-out is linked into a per-company SHA-256 hash chain. Each month a checkpoint is sealed and its fingerprint is emailed to the company's admins from the platform itself, so records can't be quietly rewritten later.
• Location checked by the server, not the phone. The database decides inside or outside the geofence, using the fence that was in force at that moment, and records its own time and IP. Whatever the device claims is overridden.
• Kiosks for shared devices. Clock in with a 4-digit code or the device's biometrics (WebAuthn), with an optional face match against the registered photo.
• Strict multi-tenancy. Each company's data is walled off by Postgres row-level security on every table (more than 2,300 policies), with a full roles and permissions system on top.
• One gateway for every AI call. A registry of AI features, a per-company AI off switch, personal-data detection and usage logging. Biometric photos deliberately never go through the general AI path. Companies can export an AI governance report.
• AI where it saves time. Clocky the assistant, a compliance copilot, schedule autofill, workforce insights and support triage, built on Anthropic's Claude.
• Payroll end to end. An in-house payroll engine with Gusto sync, and payouts through Dwolla, Stripe Connect for contractors, and Wise.
• Compliance on autopilot. A weekly FLSA sweep, timecard compliance checks, missed-punch detection and automatic closing of forgotten shifts.
• Every correction leaves a trail. Any change to a company's data is written to that company's own audit log, so a number never changes without an explanation.
• Native mobile apps. iOS and Android apps with background location, camera and push notifications, plus offline storage for spotty warehouse Wi-Fi.
• Seven apps, one codebase. The product, internal admin, marketing site, docs, careers, partners portal and status page live in one Turborepo, each deploying on its own.
• Dark mode everywhere, measured. Every screen must pass in light and dark mode, checked by measuring text contrast rather than eyeballing it.

Tools & technology

What I learned

Trust has to be designed in, not promised. The hash-chained ledger, server-side location checks and an audit trail on every correction all come from the same lesson: the moment someone can't trace why a number changed, they stop trusting the whole system. The paper timesheet failed for exactly that reason.