People & HR

How to manage benefits enrollment as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Benefits enrollment season is when a 2-person HR team earns its keep and nearly breaks under the weight. You're coordinating with a broker, chasing 150 employees across Slack and email to make elections, manually checking who hasn't submitted in Paylocity or Gusto, answering the same 'what's the difference between the HDHP and the PPO' question for the thirtieth time, and reconciling what employees elected against what the carrier actually shows. Nothing connects. Your HRIS has enrollment status but not employee questions. Your inbox has employee questions but not enrollment status. You're the glue, and you're spending two weeks a year being a very expensive form-completion tracker.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Small HR Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live enrollment tracker that pulls employee status from Paylocity or ADP on a schedule so you can see at a glance who has elected, who is pending, and who hasn't opened the portal — without logging into a separate system

An automated email triage workflow that catches benefits questions in your inbox, drafts plain-English answers to the common ones (HDHP vs PPO, HSA contribution limits, dependent coverage deadlines), and flags the genuinely complex ones for you to handle

A benefits FAQ knowledge base your employees can actually search, built from your broker documents and prior-year Q&A, so the answer to 'can I add a spouse mid-year' exists somewhere other than your brain

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule — employee records, enrollment status, benefit elections — so the tracker always reflects current state without manual exports. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider, so the email triage agent reads incoming messages, drafts replies, and logs what was handled. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries your existing HR documentation live when building the FAQ hub. Broker PDFs and carrier documents are uploaded directly into the Knowledge Management app.

Prompts to copy

Build me a benefits enrollment FAQ hub. Pull in our open enrollment guide PDF, the carrier summary of benefits documents, and the past three years of benefits Q&A emails from Gmail. Auto-categorize by topic: medical plan comparisons, HSA/FSA rules, dependent eligibility, enrollment deadlines, and life events. When an employee searches a question, surface the most relevant answer and flag anything that hasn't been updated since last plan year.

Set up an email triage workflow for open enrollment season. Watch my inbox for messages tagged or related to benefits enrollment. For each incoming question, check the benefits knowledge base first. If there's a matching answer, draft a reply with that answer plus a link to the relevant section. If the question involves a specific employee's election status or a carrier dispute, flag it as urgent and leave it for me. Send me a daily digest of what was auto-answered and what needs my attention.

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 records, benefit elections, and enrollment status on a schedule — you'll have a live roster showing every employee's current enrollment state without exporting a CSV.

2 Connect Gmail so Starch can read incoming messages and draft replies. The Gmail OAuth step takes about two minutes; you'll see a consent screen from Starch's verified connector.

3 Open the Knowledge Management app and upload your open enrollment guide, each carrier's summary of benefits, and any prior-year Q&A documents you have saved. Tell Starch: 'Organize these into a searchable benefits FAQ. Categories should be: plan comparisons, HSA and FSA rules, dependent eligibility, life event changes, and enrollment deadlines.'

4 Pull your last two years of benefits-related email threads from Gmail into the Knowledge Management app as source material. Tell Starch: 'Scan these threads for answered employee questions and add the Q&A pairs to the FAQ hub. Flag anything that looks like it might be outdated based on this year's plan documents.'

5 Set up the Email Triage agent for benefits season. Prompt: 'During open enrollment — October 15 through November 15 — watch my inbox for employee emails about benefits. Check the knowledge base before drafting any reply. If the answer is in there, draft a response and queue it for my review. If not, flag the email as needs-human and leave it unread.' Adjust the date window to match your actual enrollment period.

6 Build an enrollment status tracker as a custom Starch app. Prompt: 'Build me a dashboard that pulls from our Paylocity sync and shows every employee, their enrollment status (elected / pending / not started), which plans they've selected, and whether they have dependents added. Let me filter by department and sort by deadline proximity. Highlight anyone who hasn't acted with less than five days left.'

7 Set up a weekly automation to nudge non-responders. Prompt: 'Every Monday during open enrollment, pull the list of employees who haven't completed enrollment from Paylocity. Draft a reminder email to each person's work email, personalized with their name and the specific plans they haven't elected yet. Queue the drafts for my review before sending.'

8 Add a manager escalation step. Prompt: 'If any employee is still pending 72 hours before the enrollment deadline, draft an email to their direct manager (pull manager assignments from Paylocity) asking them to nudge their report. Add those escalations to the daily digest.'

9 After enrollment closes, run a reconciliation. Prompt: 'Pull final election data from Paylocity and compare it against the carrier enrollment confirmation file I'll upload here. Flag any discrepancy — someone who elected in Paylocity but doesn't appear on the carrier file, or vice versa.' This catches the errors that otherwise turn into billing disputes in January.

10 Publish the FAQ hub link to your company Slack and add it to the onboarding checklist in your Knowledge Management app. Tell Starch: 'Set up a monthly staleness check — if any FAQ article hasn't been reviewed in 90 days, flag it for me to confirm it's still accurate.'

See this running on Starch

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

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

November 2025 Open Enrollment — 148 employees, 3-plan offering

Sample numbers from a real run

Employees with elections complete by Day 5	94
Emails auto-drafted by triage agent (common questions)	67
Emails escalated to HR for human review	12
Manager nudges sent at 72-hour deadline	23
Carrier reconciliation discrepancies flagged	4
Hours spent on enrollment vs prior year estimate	18

In the first five days of open enrollment, 94 of 148 employees completed their elections on their own — the FAQ hub handled the volume. The email triage agent processed 79 incoming benefits questions: 67 got auto-drafted replies pulling from the carrier summary of benefits and the HSA contribution limit article (the IRS updated the 2026 limit to $4,300 for self-only coverage, and that article was the most-searched item). Of the 12 emails escalated to human review, 8 involved COBRA continuation questions for employees who'd had a qualifying life event mid-year — complex enough that the agent correctly left them alone. On the 72-hour deadline date, the tracker showed 23 employees still pending; Starch drafted manager nudge emails pulling each employee's name and manager from the Paylocity sync. 19 of those 23 completed enrollment within 24 hours. After close, the carrier reconciliation flagged 4 discrepancies — two employees who appeared on the Paylocity file but not the Blue Shield confirmation, and two dependents added in Paylocity that the carrier didn't show. Those four got resolved before the January billing cycle, avoiding the retroactive-premium nightmare from the prior year. Total HR time spent on enrollment coordination: roughly 18 hours across the two-week window, compared to an estimated 35+ hours the year before.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Enrollment completion rate by Day 7 of the open enrollment window (target: 70%+ without manual outreach)

Benefits email volume handled without HR intervention (% of incoming questions auto-drafted vs escalated)

Carrier reconciliation error rate — discrepancies between HRIS elections and carrier confirmation files

Manager escalation response rate — % of nudged managers whose reports complete enrollment within 48 hours

FAQ hub search-to-resolution rate — are employees finding answers, or are they emailing anyway after searching

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Rippling or BambooHR built-in enrollment module

Handles the election workflow well but doesn't read your inbox, doesn't build a searchable FAQ from broker documents, and gives you enrollment status without the automation layer that chases non-responders for you — you're still the one doing the follow-up.

Gusto benefits enrollment

Good for small companies on Gusto payroll, but the moment you have more than two plan options or need to reconcile against a carrier file, you're back to spreadsheets and manual email — nothing connects to your external communications.

Notion + Slack manual workflow

Free and familiar, but you're manually updating the Notion tracker, writing every FAQ entry by hand, and chasing employees yourself — the integration between enrollment status and your actual outreach doesn't exist unless you build it, which is what Starch does.

HR generalist or benefits coordinator contractor

A seasonal contractor can handle the coordination, but costs $3,000–8,000 for the enrollment window, doesn't leave behind a searchable FAQ, and you re-explain everything next year from scratch.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, email agent 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 and ADP, or do I have to export CSVs?

Starch connects directly to Paylocity and ADP — both are scheduled-sync providers, meaning your employee data, enrollment status, and payroll records sync automatically on a schedule and live in Starch's database. No manual exports. When you build the enrollment tracker, it's reading live-synced data, not a file you uploaded last Tuesday.

What about Rippling or Gusto — can Starch connect to those too?

Rippling and Gusto are both reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, where the agent queries them live when your app runs. They're not scheduled-sync providers like Paylocity and ADP, so data isn't stored in Starch between queries — but for pulling enrollment status into a dashboard or triggering an automation, live query is usually sufficient.

Will the email triage agent actually send emails to employees, or does it queue drafts for me to approve?

That's up to you — you configure it. Most HR teams set it to queue drafts for review during enrollment, because benefits answers occasionally need a human check. You can also set it to auto-send for a specific category of low-risk questions (like 'what's the enrollment deadline?') and require approval for anything involving specific employee elections or plan comparisons.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have employees' personal information in Paylocity.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's honest and worth knowing. If your security policy requires SOC 2 Type II for any system that touches employee data, that's a real constraint. The Paylocity sync pulls HR data into Starch's database, so your security team should evaluate whether that's acceptable for your current compliance posture.

Can I use this to build a general HR knowledge base, not just for benefits enrollment?

Yes — the Knowledge Management app isn't scoped to benefits. You can add your onboarding playbook, PTO policy, performance review process, manager guides, and anything else that currently lives in a Notion nobody reads or a Google Drive folder nobody can find. Starch auto-categorizes new content, detects when docs go stale, and builds onboarding paths for new hires — so it's the same app doing double duty year-round, with benefits enrollment as the seasonal peak use case.

What happens after enrollment closes — is any of this useful the other 50 weeks of the year?

The FAQ hub stays live and becomes your standing benefits resource — employees can search it for life event questions (new baby, marriage, job change) any time of year. The email triage workflow continues handling general HR inbox volume. The enrollment tracker becomes a template for next year, already connected to your Paylocity sync. And the carrier reconciliation prompt is reusable any time you need to check that your HRIS and your carrier files match — which matters when you get an unexpected invoice.