contractor tracker got a payment engine rewrite and a face-lift
came back to the contractor tracker after six weeks of it running in production. the contractor had been using it daily — real eod summaries, real drive links, vacation requests. but the payment system had a serious bug hiding under the surface.
overrode a missed day to complete and it auto-triggered a payment. payment #8 showed up on april 17, right next to #7 on the 16th. two payments one day apart. traced it to the root: the app was storing derived state — completedDaysSinceLastPayment, lastPaymentDate, paymentsMade — as cached values that every save function had to update correctly. one function missed the memo, the whole thing drifted. classic.
ripped out the entire payment calculation layer. rebuilt it as a derived system. getAllCountedDays scans daily logs, vacation approvals, and overrides to find every day that counts. getPaymentState derives total payments, cycle boundaries, and days remaining from raw payment records. nothing is stored. nothing can drift. the only way to record a payment now is the explicit button with two-step confirmation — both employer and contractor can do it.
while in there, also discovered vacation days weren't counting toward payment. getDayStatus returned "vacation" for approved days but the counter only checked for "complete". three vacation days just vanishing from the payment cycle. fixed.
shipped a bunch of UI changes too: professional white theme as the default with a dark mode toggle that persists in localStorage. rewrote the calendar — status labels and eod preview text sit inside each day cell now, four lines with word-break so nothing gets chopped mid-word. calendar badges have three states: purple PAY DAY for upcoming, orange PAYMENT DUE for passed thresholds, green PAID #N once recorded. expected pay dates calculate exactly from the last cycle end accounting for actual history.
added admin status overrides with a two-step confirmation that sends a persistent notification banner the contractor has to dismiss. payment and bonus logging. a links and references section where you tag each link to eod or a specific task. auto-expanding text areas. guest read-only view. a home button because i kept pressing browser back and losing my session.
still a single index.html. still $0/month. the contractor didn't notice any of it — just saw the calendar get prettier and a white theme appear.