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CLOCKED

Clocked shows workers what their boss owes them. Describe your week in plain words, enter your pay, and see every unpaid dollar, cited to wage law, with a claim-ready summary.

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Inspiration

Rosa washes dishes at a restaurant in Los Angeles. She works Monday to Saturday, 8am to 8pm, with no break, and every Friday she gets $700 in cash. She thinks that's just the job.

Under California law, that week was worth $1,842. She was underpaid $1,142 in a single week.

Rosa is a composite, but her story is common. Employers take about $15 billion a year from workers through minimum wage violations alone (Economic Policy Institute). That's more than all robberies, burglaries and car thefts in the US combined. Most workers never claim that money. The law is clear, but nobody helps them turn "I worked a lot" into a number, a list of violations and something they can file.

What it does

Clocked shows workers exactly what their boss owes them.

  1. Where do you work? Pick a city. Some cities set a higher minimum wage than the state, like Los Angeles at $18.42 and San Francisco at $19.61.
  2. Describe your week in plain words, in English or Spanish, like "Mon to Sat, 8am to 8pm, no break." The shifts appear on a calendar you can check and fix, including split shifts.
  3. Enter your pay, either a flat cash amount or an hourly rate.
  4. See the result: how much you were underpaid, a line by line breakdown with the statute cited on every line, each violation in plain language, and what the gap adds up to over time, up to the 3 year limit for claims.
  5. Get a claim summary you can print and take to a free Labor Commissioner wage claim or a legal aid clinic. It includes your rights: no retaliation, and immigration status doesn't matter.

Clocked currently covers California: the statewide minimum wage plus Los Angeles, San Francisco, San José and Oakland.

How we built it

Our core rule is "AI reads. The law decides."

  • Schedule reader: a built-in English and Spanish parser turns a description into shifts instantly, with no network needed. Only text it can't read goes to the Claude API, and that result is validated before it is used.
  • Worker confirms: the shifts appear on a calendar, and the worker fixes anything wrong before any math runs.
  • Wage engine: plain TypeScript with no AI. It covers minimum wage, daily and weekly overtime, double time, the 7th day rule, flat pay rules, and meal and rest break premiums. Every rule lives in one data file with its citation, and 35 automated tests check it, including Rosa's week to the cent.
  • Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind, with a design system based on Stripe's. It includes full Spanish translation, animated results and a printable claim summary.
  • Walkthrough mode: a "Play walkthrough" button drives the real app with a spotlight and captions. We used it to record our demo.

Challenges we ran into

  • Flat cash pay. Dividing $700 by 72 hours understates what's owed because it ignores overtime. California treats a fixed weekly amount as pay for 40 regular hours (Lab. Code 515(d)), so we build overtime on top of that rate.
  • Daily and weekly overtime overlap. After five 12 hour days, all 12 hours of Saturday are overtime. The engine walks the week in order to get this right.
  • "De 8 a 8." Spanish descriptions rarely say am or pm, so the parser reads an end time at or before the start as the evening.
  • Keeping the AI in its lane. Sending every description to a model would add seconds of waiting and a new failure point. So the local parser runs first, and the app works fully without AI.
  • Verifying the law. Several city minimum wages changed on July 1, 2026, so we checked every rate against official sources.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Every dollar Clocked shows links to the exact law behind it.
  • A working, polished product that goes from a plain sentence to a claim-ready summary in about a minute.
  • It's honest when nothing is wrong. A fairly paid week shows $0 owed and lists the checks that passed.
  • Full Spanish support, because many of the workers most affected are Spanish speakers.
  • 35 automated tests on the engine and parser.

What we learned

  • In legal tools, trust comes from showing your work. A number without a citation is just a guess.
  • The best use of AI here was narrow: reading messy human language, not deciding what someone is owed.
  • Wage law is simple one rule at a time, but the rules interact in ways that trip most people up. That's where software helps most.

What's next for Clocked

  • More states, starting with Washington, New York and Illinois. The rules live in one data file, so each new state is data entry plus tests.
  • More pay situations: tips, reporting time pay and final paycheck penalties.
  • A pilot with a legal aid clinic or worker center, checked against real cases before anyone relies on it.
  • Filling the Labor Commissioner's official claim form directly from the summary.
  • More languages: Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Korean.

Clocked provides legal information, not legal advice. Rosa is a composite example. All rates and laws are real and were verified in September 2026.

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