Company Dashboard

A workforce management portal for an AI Automation Consultancy — attendance, tasks, payroll, leave, expenses, and company announcements. Built with Next.js, Prisma (Postgres), and Vercel Blob for document storage — designed to deploy to Vercel with real, persistent data.

Getting Started (local development)

You need a Postgres database and a Vercel Blob store before the app will run — see Setting up storage below. Once you have both:

npm install
cp .env.example .env   # then fill in DATABASE_URL, DIRECT_URL, BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN, SESSION_SECRET
npx prisma migrate deploy   # creates the tables
npm run db:seed             # only needed once, or after resetting the database
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Default logins

Running npm run db:seed creates one admin account and a handful of sample employee accounts — see prisma/seed.ts for the exact emails and starter passwords it uses. New employees added through the Employees page get a starter password shown on screen right after creation.

Change every seeded password immediately after first login — never leave a seeded/default password in place on a real deployment, and never commit real credentials to this file or anywhere else in the repo.

What's included

• Auth — CEO/Admin and Employee roles, cookie session, per-role route protection.
• Employees — directory, profiles, departments, org reporting lines, compensation, document uploads.
• Attendance — employee clock in/out, admin day-by-day view and manual overrides.
• Tasks — Kanban board (To Do / In Progress / Done / Blocked), admin assigns, employees update their own.
• Payroll — generate monthly payroll for all active employees, edit bonuses/deductions, mark paid; employees see their own payslips.
• Leave — employees request leave, admin approves/rejects, balances tracked per type per year.
• Expenses — employees submit claims, admin approves/rejects.
• Announcements — company-wide posts, pinnable.
• Dashboard — company-wide stats and charts for admin; personal snapshot for employees.

Setting up storage (Neon + Vercel Blob)

This project (ceo-portal under the linked Vercel account) already has both provisioned via Vercel's Storage tab:

• Postgres, via the Neon marketplace integration (Storage → Create Database → Postgres). This auto-adds a bunch of POSTGRES_* / PG* vars, but this app specifically reads DATABASE_URL and DIRECT_URL, which were set manually to the pooled and unpooled connection strings Neon provided.
• Blob, via Storage → Create Database → Blob. This auto-adds BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN — nothing else needed for that one.
• SESSION_SECRET was generated separately (a different random value per environment) and added under Settings → Environment Variables.

Important gotcha: Neon's pooled connection string alone isn't enough for Prisma — it needs &pgbouncer=true appended to DATABASE_URL, or every query fails with Can't reach database server even though the pooled endpoint is perfectly reachable (Prisma's prepared-statement usage doesn't work against PgBouncer's transaction-pooling mode without that flag). DIRECT_URL (unpooled, used only for migrations) does not need this flag.

If you ever need to redo this setup from scratch (new project, rotated database, etc.):

1. Import the repo into Vercel, add Postgres (Neon) and Blob from the Storage tab.
2. In Environment Variables, set DATABASE_URL to Neon's pooled connection string plus &pgbouncer=true, and DIRECT_URL to the unpooled one, for all three environments (production/preview/development).
3. Add SESSION_SECRET.
4. For local development: vercel link, then vercel env pull .env.local.

Neon's compute also auto-suspends when idle — the very first query after a period of inactivity can take several seconds and occasionally times out once before succeeding on retry. This is normal and only affects cold starts, not steady traffic.

Deploying

git push                       # Vercel deploys automatically (GitHub integration is connected)
# or, from the CLI:
npx vercel --prod

Migrations run automatically as part of every build (prisma migrate deploy && next build, see package.json), so there's nothing extra to do after a schema change beyond pushing.

Useful commands

npm run dev          # start the dev server
npm run build        # production build
npm start             # run the production build
npm run db:studio    # browse/edit the database in Prisma Studio
npm run db:seed      # re-seed departments, admin, and sample employees
npm run db:migrate   # apply pending migrations to the database in DIRECT_URL

Notes

• Session cookies are marked secure in production, so the app must be served over HTTPS there — Vercel does this by default.
• Documents are stored in Vercel Blob as public-but-unguessable URLs; the app never exposes those URLs directly — downloads are proxied through an authenticated API route (/api/documents/[id]) that checks the requester is an admin or the owning employee before streaming the file.
• To reset all data: drop and recreate the tables (npx prisma migrate reset against your Postgres database, careful — this is destructive) and run npm run db:seed again.