People & HR

How to manage benefits enrollment as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

At 12 people, you probably don't have an HR department — you have a spreadsheet, a broker's PDF, and one employee who remembers what your dental plan actually covers. Open enrollment hits every fall and you're manually emailing each person a carrier comparison, chasing confirmations, and trying to remember who has a dependent on the plan. Paylocity or ADP might hold the payroll records, but the enrollment workflow lives in your inbox and a shared Google Drive folder nobody updates. You're the professional services founder who bills $250/hr to clients and spends two full days coordinating benefits paperwork that a 50-person company would have an HR coordinator handle.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A benefits enrollment tracker that pulls employee records from Paylocity or ADP and shows you who has confirmed enrollment, who's still pending, and what each election costs — updated automatically, not by you chasing people down.

An automated reminder sequence that messages each employee with their personalized enrollment status and deadline, so you stop being the benefits help desk.

A dashboard that shows total benefits spend by tier, headcount, and month — so when a client asks why your blended rate went up, you can actually show them the numbers.

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 Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP employee and payroll data on a schedule — headcount, pay groups, benefits eligibility, and existing enrollment records flow into the tracker automatically. Gmail is connected so Starch can monitor enrollment confirmation emails and update statuses without manual entry. Google Calendar is synced so deadline reminders land on the right dates. For carrier portals that don't have an API (most of them), Starch automates the browser — no API needed — to check enrollment confirmation status or pull plan documents directly from the carrier's web interface.

Prompts to copy

Build me a benefits enrollment tracker that pulls employee records from our Paylocity connection. Show each employee's name, department, plan tier selected (medical/dental/vision), dependent count, monthly cost, and enrollment status (confirmed, pending, waived). Flag anyone who hasn't confirmed by two weeks before the deadline.

Create a knowledge base page for our benefits enrollment process — include the plan comparison table, enrollment deadlines, who to contact for questions, and how to add a dependent. Auto-surface this to any employee who opens an enrollment-related email thread.

Set up weekly reminder tasks for me: who hasn't completed enrollment yet, total confirmed headcount vs. total eligible, and projected monthly premium cost based on elections so far.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP through Starch's scheduled sync so your employee roster, pay groups, and existing benefits elections are live in Starch — this is the source of truth for who's eligible and what they're currently enrolled in.

2 Tell Starch: 'Build a benefits enrollment tracker showing each employee's name, role, current plan tier, dependent count, monthly premium, and enrollment confirmation status — pull from Paylocity and flag anyone still pending 14 days before our November 1 deadline.'

3 Connect Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync so the tracker can automatically mark an employee as 'confirmed' when their enrollment confirmation email arrives, rather than you manually updating a spreadsheet.

4 Use the Knowledge Management app to create a single benefits reference page — carrier comparison, plan summaries, enrollment steps, dependent add instructions, and your broker's contact. Tell Starch: 'Create a benefits FAQ page pulling the plan documents from Google Drive and format it so any employee can find their answer without emailing me.'

5 Set up an automated reminder sequence: tell Starch 'Every Monday during October, send each employee in the pending list a Slack message with their current enrollment status and a link to the enrollment portal — stop sending once they confirm.'

6 For carrier portals that require manual login to confirm elections, tell Starch: 'Check the Cigna enrollment portal every Tuesday and Thursday, log in with my credentials, and pull the confirmation status for each employee on our roster — update the tracker automatically.' Starch automates this through your browser — no API needed.

7 Use the Task Manager to capture the non-automatable pieces: broker call scheduled, W-2 address verification complete, new hire mid-year enrollment pending. Tell Starch: 'Add a P1 task for me to review and approve final enrollment elections by October 28, with a reminder 3 days before.'

8 Build a cost summary view: tell Starch 'Show me total projected monthly benefits spend broken down by medical tier (employee only, employee + spouse, family), dental, and vision — and compare it to last year's spend pulled from Paylocity payroll records.'

9 When a new employee joins mid-year, tell Starch: 'Add [name] to the enrollment tracker with a 30-day enrollment window starting today, send them the benefits FAQ link, and add a reminder task for me to confirm their election before the window closes.'

10 After enrollment closes, tell Starch: 'Generate a benefits enrollment summary showing final headcount by plan tier, total monthly premium, year-over-year cost change, and any employees who waived coverage — format it so I can send it to our broker and file it.' Export it directly to Google Drive.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Fall 2026 Open Enrollment — 12-person consultancy

Sample numbers from a real run

Employees enrolled (medical)	11
Employees waived (medical)	1
Employee-only tier (4 employees)	2,160
Employee + spouse tier (3 employees)	2,850
Family tier (4 employees)	5,200
Dental — all 11 enrolled	880
Vision — 9 enrolled	270
Total projected monthly premium	11,360
Year-over-year increase (vs. 2025)	820

It's October 6 and enrollment opened two days ago. The Starch tracker is already showing 7 of 12 employees confirmed, 4 pending, and 1 who hasn't opened the benefits FAQ yet. Starch synced Paylocity overnight and flagged that one of the pending employees — a senior consultant hired in March — was on a 30-day provisional plan that needs to convert to the standard group plan by October 31. That would have been a $4,200 COBRA bill if it slipped. The Monday Slack reminders went out automatically to the 4 pending employees. The carrier portal check on Tuesday confirmed 2 additional elections that hadn't shown up in the email confirmation thread yet. By October 14, all 12 elections are confirmed. The cost summary shows $11,360/month in total premium — $820 over last year, driven by one new family-tier enrollment. You forward the summary to your broker in 90 seconds. Total time spent by you: about 40 minutes across the entire enrollment window, mostly reviewing the final summary before sending.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Enrollment completion rate by deadline (target: 100% confirmed before carrier cutoff)

Total monthly benefits premium as a percentage of total payroll cost

Year-over-year per-employee benefits cost change by tier

Time from enrollment open to full team confirmation (days)

Mid-year enrollment exceptions requiring manual broker intervention

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity or ADP benefits module

These handle payroll deductions well but the enrollment workflow — reminders, status tracking, cost summaries — still requires manual admin work or a dedicated HR coordinator you don't have.

Spreadsheet + email

Works at 5 people; at 12 with dependents and mid-year changes, you're reconciling three versions of the same sheet and answering the same questions about deductibles every October.

BambooHR or Gusto

Both have benefits enrollment features, but they're standalone HR platforms — you'd be adding another system on top of the Paylocity or ADP you're already paying for, and neither connects your enrollment data to your broader ops stack the way Starch does.

Broker-managed enrollment portal (e.g., Employee Navigator)

Your broker may provide one free, which covers the actual election capture — but it doesn't give you the real-time completion dashboard, Slack reminders, or cost analysis you need to manage the process yourself.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, knowledge management 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 connect to Paylocity or ADP, or do I have to export data manually?

Starch syncs your Paylocity and ADP data on a schedule — employees, pay groups, and benefits enrollment records flow in automatically. You don't export anything manually. The sync covers workers, org units, and pay statements; Starch doesn't write back to payroll (it's read-only), so your payroll system stays as the system of record.

What if our carrier portal doesn't have an API? Most of them don't.

That's the norm. For carrier portals, Starch automates the browser — no API needed. You give Starch your login credentials, tell it what to check, and it navigates the portal like you would and pulls the status back into your tracker. It works on any website you can log into.

We use Gusto, not Paylocity or ADP. Does this work?

Gusto is reachable through Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your app needs the data. The enrollment tracker will work; the sync cadence is on-demand rather than scheduled, so it's best for real-time lookups rather than overnight batch updates.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We handle employee PII.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement for your firm's data handling policy, that's worth knowing up front. It's on the roadmap but we won't claim it before it's done.

Can Starch send the enrollment reminders itself, or do I still have to send emails manually?

Starch can send Slack messages automatically through your connected Slack workspace. For email reminders, Gmail is connected and Starch can draft and send messages — though for anything going to employees about benefits elections, most founders prefer to review before sending. You can set it up either way: fully automated Slack reminders, or drafts queued in Gmail for your one-click approval.

We're only 12 people. Is Starch overkill for benefits enrollment?

Benefits enrollment is one piece. The same Paylocity connection, Gmail sync, and Google Calendar integration that power the enrollment tracker also power your utilization dashboard, client billing reminders, and proposal workflow. You're not buying a benefits platform — you're wiring up the data connections once and building whatever you need on top. If the only thing you needed was benefits enrollment software, your broker's portal probably does enough. Starch is for founders who need that plus twelve other things.