People & HR

How to manage benefits enrollment as Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams

People & HRFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Benefits enrollment at a small foundation is a recurring scramble. You're coordinating open enrollment across a staff of 8–15, manually tracking who's elected what coverage in a spreadsheet that lives in someone's Google Drive, chasing employees who haven't submitted their elections by the deadline, and then reconciling final elections against what actually shows up in Paylocity or ADP payroll runs weeks later. Your HR consultant set up the benefits portal three years ago and nobody fully remembers how it works. There's no grants-management tool that handles this — Fluxx and Blackbaud certainly don't. So it falls to the ops lead to be the human reminder system, the reconciliation clerk, and the compliance tracker all at once.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A benefits enrollment tracker that pulls live payroll data from Paylocity or ADP, shows you exactly who has elected, who is pending, and who missed the deadline — no more spreadsheet-chasing

Automated reminder sequences that draft and send individualized follow-up emails to employees who haven't completed enrollment, triggered on a schedule you set

A reconciliation view that compares elected benefits against actual payroll deductions after the first post-enrollment pay run, so errors surface before they compound

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

Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Paylocity (scheduled sync — employee records, payroll runs, benefits elections, pay statements refresh on a schedule). Gmail is also connected via scheduled sync so drafted reminder emails land in your outbox for one-click review and send. For foundations on ADP instead of Paylocity, the same workflows run against ADP workers and pay statements via scheduled sync. If your benefits broker portal or carrier site has no API, Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a benefits enrollment tracker that pulls employee records from Paylocity — name, department, enrollment status, and elected plan — and shows me a table of who has completed open enrollment and who hasn't, updated daily

Create an automation that runs every weekday during open enrollment: check which employees still show 'pending' enrollment status in Paylocity, draft a personalized reminder email for each one pulling their name and manager from the employee record, and queue them in my Gmail for review before sending

After the first payroll run post-enrollment, compare each employee's elected benefit deductions against what Paylocity recorded in the pay statement and flag any mismatches in a summary I can review

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP in Starch — Starch syncs your employee roster, benefits elections, payroll runs, and pay statements on a schedule so the data is always current without manual exports.

2 Tell Starch what you want: 'Build me a benefits enrollment tracker showing each employee's name, department, elected medical/dental/vision plan, enrollment status, and the deadline — sortable by status.' Starch builds the app from that description.

3 Set the enrollment window dates in your tracker so Starch knows when 'pending' becomes 'overdue' and can surface the right urgency in the dashboard.

4 Wire your Gmail connection so Starch can draft reminder emails from your account. Tell Starch: 'Every weekday during open enrollment, find employees with pending status in Paylocity, draft a reminder email addressed to each one using their first name, and save drafts in Gmail for my review.'

5 Review and send the queued reminder drafts each morning — one click per email, or tell Starch to auto-send if you trust the template.

6 For employees who need to visit the benefits broker portal to complete enrollment, tell Starch: 'Automate logging into [carrier portal] and pulling the current election status for each employee by their SSN or employee ID.' Starch handles this through browser automation — no API needed.

7 After open enrollment closes, run your compliance check: 'Show me every employee who never completed enrollment and summarize the reason if known — I need this for our HR records and board reporting.'

8 After the first payroll run post-enrollment, trigger the reconciliation: 'Compare each employee's elected benefit deduction amounts against what actually appeared in their Paylocity pay statement this period, and flag any discrepancy greater than $5.'

9 For any flagged mismatches, Starch drafts a summary you can forward to your payroll administrator or benefits broker with the specific employee names and dollar discrepancies already filled in.

10 Archive the completed enrollment cycle — tell Starch to export the final election table as a CSV or push a summary to your Notion knowledge base for the compliance file.

11 Set a calendar-triggered automation for next year's open enrollment: 'On October 1, remind me to kick off benefits enrollment and pre-populate the tracker with this year's employee roster from Paylocity.'

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

November 2025 Open Enrollment — Grantwell Family Foundation (12 employees)

Sample numbers from a real run

Employees with completed elections by Day 5	7
Employees with pending status flagged for reminder	4
Employees who missed deadline (overdue)	1
Payroll deduction mismatches caught post-enrollment	2
Dollar discrepancy flagged (dental premium error)	43

Grantwell's ops lead opened the enrollment window November 1 with a 10-day deadline. By Day 5, the Starch tracker showed 7 of 12 employees complete, 4 pending, and 1 who hadn't opened the portal at all. Starch had already drafted personalized reminder emails for the 4 pending employees each morning — the ops lead reviewed and sent them in under 3 minutes per day. The one overdue employee was flagged with a note to escalate to their manager. After the December 1 payroll run, Starch compared elected deductions against actual Paylocity pay statements and surfaced two mismatches: one employee's dental premium was recorded at $67/month instead of the elected $110 family rate — a $43 monthly error that would have been invisible until someone noticed on a pay stub. The ops lead forwarded Starch's mismatch summary to the benefits broker the same afternoon. Total time spent on enrollment coordination by the ops lead: roughly 20 minutes across the entire 10-day window, compared to the two hours of spreadsheet work and email chasing in the prior year.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Enrollment completion rate by deadline (target: 100% of eligible employees)

Days to full enrollment close from window open

Number of payroll deduction mismatches caught in first post-enrollment pay run

Ops-lead hours spent on enrollment coordination per cycle

Percentage of reminder emails resulting in completed elections within 48 hours

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity native open enrollment module

Paylocity has a built-in enrollment workflow, but it requires employees to self-navigate and gives you no automated follow-up or reconciliation view — you still end up chasing people manually and spot-checking pay stubs yourself.

Spreadsheet + email (Google Sheets / Excel)

Free and familiar, but the tracker goes stale the moment someone updates their election in the portal and forgets to tell you — you're always one step behind and reconciliation is entirely manual.

Rippling or Gusto (all-in-one HR platform)

These platforms handle enrollment natively for companies that run payroll through them, but if your foundation is already on Paylocity or ADP and not switching, you're paying for a second HR stack you don't need.

Fluxx or Blackbaud

Purpose-built for grants management, not HR — neither has any benefits enrollment functionality, and both cost six figures for the dedicated-team deployment model a small foundation can't justify.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — founder inbox, 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

We use ADP, not Paylocity — does this work?

Yes. Starch syncs your ADP worker records, org units, and pay statements on a schedule — the same enrollment tracker and reconciliation workflows run on ADP data. You describe the same app to Starch and point it at ADP instead.

What if our benefits carrier portal has no API — can Starch still pull election status from it?

Yes. Starch automates your benefits carrier portal through browser automation — no API needed. As long as you can log into the portal and navigate to election status, Starch can do the same thing programmatically and pull the data into your tracker.

Can Starch actually send the reminder emails, or do I have to review every one?

Your call. Starch can queue all drafts in Gmail for your one-click review before sending, or you can tell it to auto-send after you've approved the template. Most small teams review once to confirm the tone is right, then switch to auto-send for subsequent reminders in the same cycle.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? We handle employee PII and need to know before connecting payroll data.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's the honest answer. If your foundation's data governance policy requires SOC 2 Type II for any system touching employee PII, that's a real constraint to weigh. It's on the roadmap.

We only do open enrollment once a year. Is Starch worth setting up for something this infrequent?

The enrollment tracker itself is a one-time build — once it's set up, it runs the same workflow next year with fresh data from Paylocity or ADP. But the underlying connections (payroll sync, Gmail drafts) are the same ones you'd use for donor update letters, board dashboards, and program spend reconciliation the rest of the year. The enrollment workflow is one app on top of infrastructure that earns its keep year-round.

What about QuickBooks? Can Starch reconcile benefits costs against our program expense budget?

Yes. Starch syncs your QuickBooks bills, payments, and journal entries on a schedule. You can build a view that pulls benefits-related expenses from QuickBooks and compares them against your budget line — useful for board reporting on total compensation costs as a percentage of operating budget.