A paycheck that explains itself

A stylist stops you on the way past. "Why is my pay different this time?" The answer is on the pay report, spread across nine columns, and reading it out is a conversation neither of you enjoys having standing up.

Getting one

Open a pay period and click a staff member's name — the row expands into their daily breakdown, and at the bottom of it sits Explain [name]'s pay with a single button.

Press it and you get a paragraph: what they earned, what it was made of, how it compares with last period, and what actually drove the difference. Not "sales were up" — "service commission rose $2,112.75 as they took on 33 more services than the previous period".

Two framings, one set of facts

Once it has run, two buttons appear at the top of the panel:

• For [name] writes it to them. Second person, warm, the version you'd read out or paste into a message.
• For you to send frames the same facts for an owner to forward — the version that reads properly with your name at the bottom of it.

Switching between them rewrites the paragraph. Neither changes a number, because neither one calculated any: the figures come from the pay lines already sitting on the row above.

Where the figures come from

This is the point worth trusting it on. The period's pay is worked out before any of this happens — hours, service commission, product commission, tips, adjustments, salary, the total. That calculation has nothing to do with AI and doesn't change when you press the button.

What the assistant is handed is the finished result, and what it produces is prose about it. If a sentence looks wrong, the row it describes is directly above it, and one of them is checkable in about ten seconds. See where the answers come from.

Your team's own version

The same explanation is available to the person it's about, without going through you. On their paystub, Explain my pay turns their own breakdown into the same kind of paragraph for the period they're looking at.

That's usually the better route for a recurring question. A stylist who can answer "why is this different" themselves at eleven at night doesn't need to ask you at nine in the morning.