Trap and Trigger: Claude can see the timesheets, never the pay rates
Trap and Trigger is a New Zealand conservation and pest-control contractor working to restore balance to Aotearoa's wilderness. What started as a workshop has grown into Claude connected to their payroll and job data, with monthly support to keep it sharp.
- Client
- Trap and Trigger, Upper Hutt
- Industry
- Conservation and pest control
- Our role
- Workshop, custom connectors, automation and ongoing support
- Working together since
- October 2025
The brief
Trap and Trigger's real work happens in the field. The admin around it - tenders, timesheets, job codes, reporting - lands on a small office team, and the data they need sits in systems that were never built to talk to AI.
The goal was to get AI doing useful work inside the business, with the director deciding exactly what it could and couldn't see.
How the work grew
- October 2025 - January 2026
Daily job reporting
A daily job reporting app: someone talks through the day, and it is transcribed and turned into a structured report automatically.
- April 2026
Hands-on workshop
A half-day session at their Upper Hutt office, laptops open, working through their own tasks. It produced a Claude setup plan and a tender-drafting skill.
- June - September 2026
Claude connected to payroll
A custom connector gives Claude access to PayHero timesheets, leave and job data, with every pay detail stripped out. Monthly support starts in October.
A payroll connector built money-blind
Payroll is where AI access feels riskiest, so the connector was designed around what Claude must never see.
The useful parts, in plain English
Timesheets, leave and jobs from PayHero, available to Claude so the team can ask questions instead of digging through screens.
Pay details stripped out
Pay rates, bank accounts and IRD numbers are removed in both directions. Claude never sees them, even if someone asks.
The director's call
The pay block was added at the director's request. The client decides what the AI can reach, not the other way round.
A person confirms every change
A write edition is in testing. It previews each change and waits for a person to confirm it before anything is saved.
Claude can help with the timesheets. It can't see what anyone is paid.
What's running today
- Claude connected to PayHero, read-only, with pay rates, bank accounts and IRD numbers redacted.
- A nightly sync from Xero into the team's track record spreadsheet.
- A Claude skill that drafts tender responses and colour-codes each answer green, yellow or red by how sure it is.
- Google Sheets and Docs connected to Claude.
- Monthly AI support from October 2026, with a Site App Pro connector for field reports next.
In their words
Blake has become our go-to for everything AI in our business. He started by helping us set up Claude across the business and training our team to actually use it well, then built out a range of connections between our AI systems and the apps we run day to day, both native integrations and custom ones like our PayHero setup that we had struggled to get working ourselves.
Beyond the technical builds, Blake has been a genuine sounding board. He talks through our ideas with us, gives honest advice on what is worth doing, and steers us away from things that will not pay off. He has built us AI tools for reporting and project tracking that have made a real difference to how we operate.
What stands out is how easy he is to deal with. He keeps us in the loop, hits his timelines, and hands over tools that work along with clear instructions so we can run with them. He knows his stuff and gets things done.
We would happily recommend Blake and Harkness AI to any business looking to get real value out of AI.
Running a field business?
Crews, timesheets, job codes and tenders. We connect Claude to the systems you already use, with the guardrails you ask for.
Last updated 19 September 2026