How to manage benefits enrollment on Starch

Benefits enrollment is one of those operator workflows that looks manageable until it isn't. Once a year — or whenever a new hire joins — you're coordinating deadlines, fielding employee questions, chasing down missing elections, and making sure the right data lands in your payroll system before the carrier cuts off changes. The stakes are real: a missed enrollment window means an employee is uninsured, or on the wrong plan, with no fix until next year.

What this looks like in practice depends heavily on your team size, whether you run payroll through ADP or Paylocity, how benefits-literate your workforce is, and whether HR is a dedicated function or something you're doing between other things. A 12-person team and a 60-person team are solving meaningfully different versions of this problem.

On Starch, the result is that enrollment status is visible in one place — which employees have elected, which haven't, which submissions are still pending — without you manually checking three systems. Reminder emails go out on their own before deadlines close. Incomplete enrollments surface as tasks before they become problems. You end the enrollment window knowing what got done and what didn't, without having spent the week as the person every employee emails when they can't find the link.