Healthcare · optometry · Wichita Family Vision · Live April 2026

Time-off and payroll for an independent eye clinic: paper slips gone, and a system that runs itself year after year.

Green paper slips, hand-checked calendars, payroll rebuilt from paper. Now staff ask from their phones, the manager approves with one tap, and the payroll report builds itself every pay period, year after year.

60 to 100hrs/yr of admin time returned 10 to 12 paper slips a pay period at 15 to 20 minutes each, plus the manual calendar checks and payroll prep they caused.

327requests filed, approved and posted to the calendar through it since April, with no paper slip in sight

One request, from phone to payroll: asked on a phone, approved from one email, the payroll report updated. Sample names and dates, screens simplified.

Diagram: one form feeds an Apps Script engine that writes the attendance sheet, shared calendar, approval email, balances, and payroll report — One form, one engine, five outputs.

At a glance

Client: Wichita Family Vision, an independent optometry practice in Wichita, Kansas.
Who uses it: Every employee files from a phone; the office manager approves; the bookkeeper runs payroll from it. Live since April 2026.
Shipped: Live April 2026. About 8 weeks, then 3 months of fixes found in production.
Stack: Google Apps Script
Google Forms
Google Sheets
Google Calendar
Gmail
clasp
Node test runner
Compliance: Employee data only, no patient data, kept entirely inside the clinic's own Google Workspace. Built under the same business associate agreement as the clinic's other systems.
Cost to run: $0 a month to run. Built at an hourly rate for the clinic.
My role: I built it: the engine, the accrual and date math, the migration, the payroll report, the tests, and the guides. A second engineer added the employee-management dialogs and audited the sheets.

What I built

The build

One Google Form on any phone. Staff pick dates and a type; partial days handled.
An Apps Script engine that counts weekdays only, rounds to the clinic's rule, checks department conflicts, writes the attendance sheet and the shared calendar, and sends a one-tap approve or deny email.
Anniversary-based accrual in year one, then calendar years. Balances are recomputed from the grid on every write instead of incremented, so a manual edit can never drift the totals.
A payroll report every pay period, built into a dated folder for the bookkeeper. All 26 employee records migrated by a 700-line script that preserved the audit notes.
A new year is one click. Next year's records for all 26 staff were built on 2 October 2026 from the admin menu, after a full rehearsal on copies, so requests for 2027 already work. The manager adds the paid hours with one more click.

The approve or deny email — The manager approves from her phone.

The request form on a phone — The whole intake is one form.

Terminal output: 183 tests passing — 183 assertions, green.

What changed

Before and after

Before

By hand

Filing a requestA green paper slip

ApprovingIn the office, on paper

The calendarChecked by hand

BalancesHand-tracked, drifted

Payroll prepRebuilt from paper each period

A new yearNew paper, new balances by hand

After

The system

Filing a requestA form on any phone

ApprovingOne tap in an email, from anywhere

The calendarEvents post themselves

BalancesRecomputed on every write

Payroll prepA report that builds itself

A new yearOne click from the admin menu

Where the numbers come from. The clinic estimated 10 to 12 slips a pay period at 15 to 20 minutes of handling each, before the calendar checks and payroll prep. 26 pay periods a year puts the range at 60 to 100 hours. The 327 requests are the system's own log on 1 October 2026.

For engineers

How it's built

Architecture: Form submit trigger into a bound Apps Script project of about 7,000 lines: validation, weekday and anniversary math, attendance-sheet writes, a calendar owned by a Workspace user the script runs as, approve and deny links served by a pinned web-app deployment, and a payroll builder on a time trigger.
Where it runs: Entirely inside the clinic's Google Workspace. No server, no SaaS bill, $0 a month.
Tests and evals: 183 regression assertions in the public repo, run with Node, no dependencies. Sections cover accrual routing, weekend-aware date math, partial days, recompute-on-write balance integrity, and the migration.
Cost and latency: $0 a month to run. Built at an hourly rate for the clinic.
Guardrails: The web app URL is read from a config sheet, never from the script API, because the API returns a hidden test deployment. Every change that touches the approve button rolls the pinned deployment; skipping that once put new code on form-submit and old code on approvals. Error emails go to me, action emails go to the manager, so a test can never land in her inbox.
The tradeoff we chose: Why this way and not the other
Apps Script over a hosted app. The clinic already paid for Google Workspace, the office manager lives in Sheets, and the data never leaves their account. A hosted app would have meant a login, a bill, and a vendor for a 26-person office. The cost of that choice is a deployment model with sharp edges, which the tests and the runbook now cover.
Code: github.com/alecstephens3-stack/apps-script-pto-payroll
Anniversary-aware period routing, recompute-on-write balances, no dependencies, 183 tests.

Public repo, 183 tests

In their words

“It is already saving me some time, and I am getting information back to the team much quicker.”

Gabe Walsh, Office Manager, Wichita Family Vision