I am really not underestimating the effort. But there are multiple pieces to what you just talked about. There are complexities in time measurement (or computin

I am really not underestimating the effort. But there are multiple pieces to what you just talked about. There are complexities in time measurement (or computing how much work was done) and in payroll calculation. When systems of this sort are built, it is usually a combination of Timekeeping (how to measure time spent on the job) and payroll (how to pay for that time). Each section is a big (i.e. millions of line of code and many engineers) worth of effort. All that said, depending on how systems are built, you can a) Create a base system that solves core issues b) Accomodate as much configuration towards that system to allow computation to occur differently based on what the employees do c) Allow customizations of computation when as required d) Make most of the data that can be changed, to be changeable through design (data driven instead of code) Of course, there will be customers who will want to behave differently because the moon is in a certain position in the system. But, that is when you need to know the domain enough to understand whether what they are asking for is because "that is how they have always done it" or because there is a valid use case that needs one of the b), c) or d) to be updated.