Build an HR management system with attendance, leave and payroll

You are a senior developer who builds HR and payroll software. Build an HR management system with me, phase by phase, with an admin portal and a mobile-friendly employee self-service portal.

## The company
- Company and size: [NAME], [NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES]
- Country and payroll rules: [e.g. India with PF, ESI, PT, TDS]
- Work pattern: [office / field staff / shifts / remote]
- Approval chain: [e.g. employee → manager → HR]
- Tech stack I prefer: [STACK or "you choose"]

## Features
1. Employees: profiles, documents, departments, designations, reporting lines (org chart), onboarding checklist, exit process.
2. Attendance: web and mobile check-in with selfie and geo-fencing for field staff, biometric device import, shifts and rosters, late and early rules, regularisation requests.
3. Leave: leave types and policies (accrual, carry forward, encashment), holiday calendar by location, apply and approve flow, team leave calendar, balance display.
4. Payroll: salary structures with components, monthly payroll run using attendance and leave, statutory deductions for [COUNTRY], reimbursements, arrears, loans and advances, payslip PDF, bank transfer file, payroll reports and statutory returns data.
5. Employee self-service: payslips, tax declarations and proofs, leave, attendance, documents, profile update requests, announcements.
6. Performance (light): goals and reviews per cycle.
7. Dashboards: headcount, attrition, attendance trends, payroll cost.
8. Roles: admin, HR, manager, employee, with strict data access.

## HR rules
- Payroll calculations are tested with a set of worked examples and can be re-run for a month before it is locked; locked months cannot change without an audit entry.
- Salary data is visible only to HR and the employee; encrypt bank and ID details.
- Flag every country-specific rule that should be confirmed by a payroll or legal expert.

## Quality rules (apply to every phase)
- Security: prepared statements or an ORM for every query, output escaping, CSRF tokens on every form, passwords hashed with bcrypt or Argon2, rate-limited login, role checks on the server for every admin route, file uploads checked by type and size and stored outside the web root or with random names, secrets only in an .env file.
- Validation: validate every input on the server (and also in the browser for speed). Show clear error messages next to the field that is wrong, and keep what the user already typed.
- Performance: pagination on every list, database indexes on every column used for search, filter or join, lazy-loaded and resized images (WebP), caching for pages that rarely change, no N+1 queries.
- Responsive and accessible: mobile first, works from 360px to wide desktop, proper labels on every form field, keyboard navigation, visible focus, colour contrast of at least 4.5:1, alt text on images.
- SEO: clean URLs, a unique title and meta description per page, canonical tags, Open Graph tags, schema.org JSON-LD where it applies, an XML sitemap and robots.txt.
- Code: small functions with clear names, one responsibility per file, comments only where the reason is not obvious, consistent formatting, no dead code.
- Errors: friendly error pages (404, 500), server errors written to a log, never shown to visitors.
- Deliver with: a README (install steps, .env example, how to create the first admin), database migrations and seed data with realistic sample content, and a deployment checklist.

## How to work with me
Do not write code yet. First reply with:
1. A short summary of what you understood, and anything in the brief that is unclear or contradictory (ask me, do not guess).
2. The final tech stack, with a one-line reason for each choice.
3. The folder and file structure.
4. The full database schema: every table, column, type, index and relation.
5. Every page or screen, and every API endpoint (method, path, who can call it, what it returns).
6. The build plan as numbered phases, each one small enough to finish and test on its own.

Wait for me to reply "go". Then build one phase at a time:
- For every file, give the full path and the complete code. Never write "...", "rest of the code stays the same" or TODO.
- After each phase, tell me how to run it, what to click to test it, and what is still missing. Then wait for me to reply "next".
- If you change a file you already gave me, give the whole updated file again.