People & HR

How to manage benefits enrollment as CPG Founders

People & HRFor CPG Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

When you're running a CPG brand with a team of five, benefits enrollment is the kind of task that falls entirely on you — or whoever you've half-assigned to 'HR.' Every November you're juggling a broker PDF, a Paylocity or ADP portal, and a spreadsheet of employee elections that someone emailed you. Employees ask the same questions about deductibles and HSA limits over Slack. You lose a week chasing down completed forms. New hires who join in February get enrolled late because there's no system — just you remembering. And if you're using a PEO, half the enrollment data lives in their portal and never makes it back to your books.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor CPG Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A central enrollment tracker that pulls your employee roster from Paylocity or ADP and tracks who has completed elections, who hasn't, and what coverage each person selected — without you manually reconciling a spreadsheet.

An automated email and task workflow that surfaces overdue enrollment forms, sends deadline reminders to employees who haven't responded, and flags new hires who need to be added to the next enrollment window.

A knowledge base page that answers the benefits questions your team asks every year — deductible amounts, HSA contribution limits, dependent add deadlines — so employees stop Slacking you and you stop being the bottleneck.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Email Agent Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your employee roster, payroll runs, and benefits data from Paylocity (or ADP) on a schedule — so your enrollment tracker always reflects your actual headcount, including recent hires and terminations. Gmail is connected directly to Starch so the Email Agent can send deadline reminders and triage inbound benefits questions from employees. The Knowledge Management app stores your plan documents and FAQ answers; AI search surfaces the right answer when an employee queries it.

Prompts to copy

Build me a benefits enrollment tracker that pulls our employee list from Paylocity, shows each person's enrollment status (not started, in progress, complete), the plan they selected, and their dependents. Flag anyone who hasn't completed enrollment 5 days before the deadline.

Set up an automated email reminder that goes out to any employee who hasn't completed benefits enrollment 7 days before the deadline, and again 2 days before. Pull the employee list from Paylocity so I don't have to maintain it manually.

Create a knowledge base section called 'Benefits 2026' that answers: What are our medical plan deductibles? How much can I contribute to my HSA? When can I add a dependent? How do I enroll a new hire mid-year? Keep it searchable so employees can find answers without asking me.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP to Starch. Starch syncs your employee roster, pay groups, and benefits enrollment data on a schedule — so your headcount is always current without a manual export.

2 Build the enrollment tracker app by describing it in plain language: which employees are enrolled, which plan they picked, whether dependents are added, and a status column (not started / in progress / complete).

3 Set a deadline field for each enrollment window (annual open enrollment, new hire 30-day window, qualifying life event). Starch flags employees who are past deadline and haven't completed enrollment.

4 Wire Gmail to Starch. Set up an automated reminder that emails any employee with 'not started' or 'in progress' status at 7 days and again at 2 days before the deadline — pulling names and deadlines from your enrollment tracker automatically.

5 Use the Email Agent to triage inbound benefits questions from employees. It categorizes them (plan question, enrollment issue, dependent add, new hire question), drafts a reply pulling from your Knowledge Management content, and flags anything that needs a broker or HR decision.

6 Build a Knowledge Management page with your 2026 benefits FAQ — deductibles, out-of-pocket maxes, HSA limits, dependent deadlines, mid-year enrollment rules. Link it in your email signature and Slack bio so employees find it before they message you.

7 Add a new hire enrollment task to your onboarding checklist in Task Manager. When someone joins, Starch creates a task: 'Enroll [name] in benefits by [date]' — due 25 days after start date, flagged P1 if it's within 5 days of expiring.

8 Set up a weekly summary automation: every Monday, Starch pulls the enrollment tracker and Slacks or emails you a status report — total employees, how many have completed enrollment, how many are outstanding, and who the stragglers are.

9 When open enrollment closes, use Starch to export a clean election summary by plan, coverage tier, and department. This is what you hand your broker or enter into your carrier portal — no manual reconciliation.

10 For qualifying life events mid-year (new baby, marriage, address change), create a simple intake form that Starch monitors. When someone submits, it creates a task in Task Manager with the 30-day enrollment window countdown and drafts the confirmation email.

11 After enrollment closes, archive the season's data in Knowledge Management so you have a record of what was offered, what elections looked like, and any issues that came up — useful when renewing with your broker next year.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Open Enrollment November 2025 — 14-person CPG team

Sample numbers from a real run

Employees requiring enrollment	14
Completed by day 7 of window	6
Reminder emails sent automatically	16
Completed after first reminder	5
Completed after second reminder	3
Required manual follow-up	0
Founder hours spent chasing enrollment	1

In November 2025, you opened a 14-day enrollment window for your 14-person team — a mix of full-time warehouse staff, two part-time sales reps, and seven brand and ops employees. Starch pulled the employee roster from Paylocity on day one, auto-populated the tracker, and set everyone's status to 'not started.' Six people completed enrollment in the first week without any prompting. On day 8, Starch automatically emailed the remaining eight employees — using their first names, the deadline date, and a link to your Knowledge Management benefits FAQ — and five completed within 24 hours. On day 12, Starch sent a second reminder to the three remaining; all three completed that day. No one needed a personal Slack message from you. Total founder time spent: roughly one hour building the system on day one, and 20 minutes reviewing the final export before sending it to your broker. The prior year, without Starch, the same enrollment window cost you three hours of personal follow-up across five days and still had two employees miss the deadline.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Enrollment completion rate by deadline (target: 100% before close of window)

Days to full enrollment from window open — how many days before the deadline you hit 100%

New hire enrollment completion within 30-day eligibility window — critical to avoid coverage gaps

Founder hours spent on benefits admin per enrollment cycle

Inbound benefits questions answered without founder involvement (Knowledge Management deflection rate)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Paylocity or ADP built-in enrollment tools

These handle the actual carrier enrollment submission, but they don't automate reminders, create a founder-facing tracker, or answer employee questions — you still chase people manually and live inside the payroll portal UX, which isn't built for a five-person ops team.

PEO (Justworks, TriNet, Rippling PEO)

A PEO bundles benefits administration and often has better carrier rates at small headcount, but enrollment data stays siloed in their platform, you pay a per-employee fee on top of everything else, and you lose visibility into your own employee data without exporting it yourself.

Google Sheets + Gmail manual process

Free and flexible, but you're the automation — every reminder, every status update, every export is manual, and the spreadsheet goes stale the moment someone's employment status changes in Paylocity.

BambooHR or Rippling standalone

Full-featured HR platforms with built-in benefits administration, but at 10-20 employees you're paying for a surface area you'll use 20% of, and they don't connect to the rest of your CPG ops stack the way Starch does.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, email agent, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually submit elections to my insurance carrier?

No. Starch tracks who has completed enrollment, automates reminders, and produces a clean election summary — but the actual carrier submission goes through your broker portal or payroll system (Paylocity, ADP) as it normally does. Think of Starch as the coordination and visibility layer, not the carrier connection.

We use a PEO. Can Starch still help?

Yes, with a caveat. If your PEO is Rippling or another system reachable from Starch's integration catalog, the agent can query it live. If your PEO runs on a proprietary portal, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. The enrollment tracker and reminder workflows still run on top of whatever employee data Starch can reach.

What if an employee joins mid-year with a qualifying life event — can Starch handle that?

Yes. You can build a simple intake workflow that captures the life event (birth, marriage, address change), creates a task in Task Manager with the 30-day enrollment window countdown, and triggers a reminder sequence. The new hire or event is flagged in your tracker the day Paylocity or ADP syncs the updated record.

Is our employee data secure? We're not SOC 2 certified either, but our broker asks.

Honest answer: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your broker or a future enterprise customer requires SOC 2 Type II from every tool that touches employee data, that's a real consideration. For most small CPG teams, this is an acceptable tradeoff — but you should know it going in.

Can Starch sync directly with our benefits broker's portal?

If your broker uses a web-based portal, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. It can log in, pull the current plan documents, check submission status, or fill out election forms. If the broker has an API, it's likely reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps. Either way, describe what you need and Starch will tell you the fastest path.

We only have 8 employees. Is this overkill?

At 8 people, the manual process is annoying but survivable. The ROI clicks when you're adding two or three people a quarter — each new hire is a 30-day enrollment window you have to track manually, and missing it means a coverage gap and a very unhappy employee. Building the system at 8 means it's already running at 20.