TrueHour

A gadget with no software

This one had a customer before it had any code. There's an accountant I know who runs payroll for an office with a ton of employees, and he had one of those fingerprint clock-in boxes on the wall. Everyone taps in on the way in and out, and the box records every single punch.

The problem: it gave him all that data as a cryptic log file and basically said good luck. There was no real software to turn that file into actual payable hours. So every pay period turned into a manual spreadsheet grind, pairing up ins and outs, catching the day someone forgot to clock out, doing the math, praying he didn't typo a cell. For the whole office. By hand.

He asked if I could help. So I built him TrueHour.

From cryptic log to payroll

You drag the box's export onto TrueHour and it handles the boring part: reads the punches, pairs them into shifts, works out the hours for everyone. Drop next week's file on top and it merges it in cleanly instead of duplicating stuff, so you're never scared to import twice.

The actually hard part was never the math, it was the mess. People forget to clock out. They tap twice. A night shift rolls past midnight and confuses everything. So TrueHour flags every shift that looks off, sorts them by how much you should worry, and offers a one-click fix, including one that guesses the missing punch from that person's own history. You're still the one deciding, it just stops you from hunting for problems by eye.

Built for a real office, so built carefully

A few things mattered specifically because this was someone's actual payroll:

• It's fully offline. No account, no cloud, no subscription. Attendance data is sensitive, and the easiest way to keep it private is to just never let it leave the building. It's one file you run.
• Every edit is tracked. Full history with snapshots, so you can see what changed, undo it, or roll back to an earlier version. Payroll is not the place for "I think I fixed it."
• The database can be encrypted behind a password, because of course it should be.
• It exports clean reports to Excel and CSV, with the headers in whatever language the office actually uses.

The bit that quietly made my day

It also speaks English, Hebrew, and Arabic, layout flipping and all, and there's a demo mode full of fake employees so you can click around everything without touching real data. But honestly the part I'm proudest of is the most boring one: a job that used to eat a whole afternoon now takes a few minutes, and the guy doing it stopped dreading the end of the month. That's the entire reason it exists.