Top Benefits Administration Systems - 2023

As an employer, you are required to offer certain benefits (like health insurance and Social Security), while others are “nice-to-haves” that can help with recruiting and retention. 

The more benefits you offer, the more administrative work you have to manage — unless, of course, you use benefits administration software. If you offer any or all of the following benefits, a benefits admin platform can streamline how you manage them — and how employees sign up for them:

• Social Security: A federal benefits program that provides insurance for older workers and their spouses, those whose spouse or qualifying ex-spouse have died, and the disabled.
• Worker’s Comp: Benefits given to employees who suffer work-related injuries or illnesses. It helps cover medical care, wages from lost wok time, and more.
• Health Insurance: A type of insurance that covers medical and surgical expenses. This is arguably your biggest benefits expense.
• Unemployment Insurance: A state-provided insurance that workers are eligible for if they lose their job and meet other requirements.
• Family Medical Leave: The Family and Medical Leave Act (also known as FMLA) provides up to 12 weeks of job-protected leave per year to care for a seriously injured or ill immediate family member (i.e. spouse, child, or parent). While the leave is unpaid, FMLA requires that health benefits remain intact.
• Vacation Time & Other Paid Leave: This can include a certain number of PTO days, sick days, and parental leave for your full-time employees.
• Affordable Care Act (ACA) Coverage: The landmark health reform, also known as Obamacare. Under the ACA, employers with 50 or more full-time employees are required to offer affordable, essential coverage to their full-time employees or choose to pay a tax penalty.
• Dental Insurance: A type of insurance that covers certain dental procedures and expenses.
• Vision Insurance: A type of insurance that covers certain vision procedures and expenses.
• Pet Insurance: A type of insurance that covers certain veterinary costs when your pet gets sick or injured.
• Wellness Programs: While these differ per company, wellness programs are designed to promote long-term health for employees. Some programs include discounts on gym memberships, providing on-site fitness classes, offering preventative health screenings, hosting stress management workshops, stocking kitchens with healthy snacks, etc.
• Financial Wellness: Financial wellness programs are designed to help employees take control of their finances so they can spend smarter, reduce debt, and save more money. Such programs include retirement/401k plans, student debt repayment, and more. 
• Education Benefits: Also known as tuition benefits, education programs are designed to give employees opportunities to further their education. For example, some companies offer employees a reimbursement benefit up to a certain amount that covers classes, courses, certifications, etc. 
• Life Insurance: A type of insurance that provides a lump-sum payment to the insured’s beneficiaries upon the insured’s passing.
• HSA & FSA: Pre-tax dollars that can be used for health-related and other approved expenses.

If you're not sure what benefits to offer at your company (besides, of course, the bare minimum requirements), consider who your full-time employees are. 

In other words, what is important to them? For example, if the bulk of your employees are fresh out of college, a financial wellness benefit that helps them pay off their student debt will be a very attractive offering. You could also survey your employees if you're on the fence about a certain benefit to see if it’s something they actually want and would use.

The features we just listed are pretty comprehensive, but benefits admin software won't take everything benefits-related off of your plate. Not only that, benefits management in general has its share of challenges. To make sure you do benefits "right," have successful open enrollment periods, and don't blow your benefits budget, here are six considerations and common mistakes to look out for:

• Choosing benefits that fit your company's need vs everything: As you probably already know, there are seemingly endless benefits you could offer to your employees. While it might be tempting to offer everything under the sun (which can be a great recruiting tool), you might end up creating more work and spending more money than it’s worth. In other words, you could wind up offering (and paying for) benefits that your employees don’t actually use. So think about what makes sense for your company and your employees — and start there.
• Not allowing employees to pick and choose benefits: By nature, people like having choices and making informed decisions for themselves. So give them different options so they can pick and choose the benefits that are right for them.
• Compliance with mandated benefits: Under laws like the Affordable Care Act, certain benefits are required for businesses of 50 or more full-time employees. If you don’t stay compliant, you could be charged fees. Fortunately, many benefits admin solutions offer automated compliance workflows so you can get the right forms to the right regulatory bodies when you need to.
• Knowing which benefits are offered tax free: Offering tax-free benefits are a win-win for your company and your employees. For example, tax-free benefits like health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts, commuter benefits, even tuition benefits can save your employees — and your company — money. After all, the income your employees set aside pre-tax for these benefits does NOT count toward your payroll tax dues. So, you could be leaving money on the table if you don’t offer tax-free benefits — or if your employees aren’t taking advantage of them.‍
• Costs can get high quickly: Your benefits offering can get expensive very quickly, especially when it comes to healthcare coverage. There are a variety of ways to keep your costs in check — from cost-sharing with employees (i.e. with increased employee contributions and higher deductibles), to changing vendor partners (like moving retirees from group plans to Medicare), to managing pharmacy spend (for example, encouraging the use of generic prescriptions or adding a narrow network).

Benefits admin software can help your company in a myriad of ways. Here is a summary of the benefits we’ve mentioned:

• Compliance: At the most basic level, you’re required by law to offer certain benefits — and benefits admin software makes it easier for you to stay compliant with these laws.
• Less Busy Work: Because benefits admin software lets you automate the paperwork-heavy busy-work associated with benefits, your team will have more time to focus on other high-priority areas.
• Employee Satisfaction: Open enrollment will no longer feel like a chore for your employees — instead, they’ll be able to make smart enrollment decisions online and, in most cases, with just a few clicks. Offering a full-suite of benefits (that are easy to elect) will help you attract top candidates to your organization — and keep them once they’re hired.
• Smarter Investments: Because benefits admin software offers reporting, you’ll be able to see what benefits are being utilized the most — and which ones aren’t worth investing in further.

To get an idea of what benefits like these can actually do for your bottom line, check out our HR Tech ROI Calculators.

Most benefits admin platforms charge on a per-employee-per month basis and offer tiered pricing depending on the amount of features and functionality you’re looking for. We’ve seen pricing start as low as $8/employee/month. 

When you have your demo(s), you should get a pricing plan that is customized for your company and needs. Just make sure that each quote you get breaks down the features that are included so you can easily compare and make the most informed investment for your company.

Benefits administration software isn’t just a way to centralize your benefits management and alleviate the burdens of paperwork and other administrative tasks. They also offer a host of integrations and features to make your job easier, keep you compliant, save you money, and promote employee engagement. Let’s take a look:

• Suite of Benefits: Depending on the vendor you choose, you can manage all of your benefits in one place. We’ll talk about this later in the guide, but remember to ask your vendor(s) of choice which benefits are included with their solution.
• Online Enrollment & Self-Service for Employees: Allow employees to opt-in to their benefits elections themselves — and say goodbye to endless paperwork. With a safe and secure benefits admin platform, your employees can easily enroll in their plans of choice online — or even through a mobile app.
• Plan Configuration: Easily set up and manage all plans and benefits in one place. This not only makes things easier for your HR/people operations team, it also makes benefits shopping easier for your employees. They can more easily compare plans and sign up online.
• Payroll Integration: Integrate your benefits and payroll data so the right deductions automatically sync to each employee’s payroll record.
• Simple Onboarding: Make onboarding easy for new employees by centralizing all necessary paperwork and enrollment opportunities in one place. What’s more, if an employee leaves your company, you can just as easily un-enroll them and initiate COBRA.
• COBRA: Easily manage COBRA eligibility and compliance with automated reporting to your COBRA administrator. 
• ACA Reporting: The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50+ full-time employees to report healthcare coverage to the IRS. With benefits administration software, you can easily generate forms 1094 and 1095 and submit your reports for you so you stay compliant (and avoid fees).
• More Compliance: In addition to ACA and COBRA compliance, benefits administration software can help you stay compliant in other areas — and get ahead of changing regulations. This includes compliance with HIPAA (i.e. protecting employees’ Personal Health Information, or PHI), ERISA, the Dept. of Labor, the IRS, and OSHA.
• Reporting: Automate reporting of your HR data — including billing insights, headcount and attrition reports, job and salary reports, and more — to make more strategic, data-driven people decisions. You could even benchmark against other companies in your space to see if there are opportunities or areas of improvement. 

As you develop your full benefits package, think about the features that would benefit your employees the most AND that would help make your job easier.

We always recommend demoing a couple vendors so you can see their platforms in action before you actually invest. To prepare for your demos, create a list of questions specific to your company’s benefits needs. Here are some sample questions to get you started:

• What benefits does your platform have?
• What benefits do you find are most attractive to employees like mine?
• How can employees sign up for benefits?
• Can employees access their benefits plan on their phones?
• How does HR create a benefits plan?
• How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack and therefore what integrations do I need?
• How will others in the organization use this solution?
• What are the key features I want to ask about?
• What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution?

The first step to implementing benefits admin software is figuring out what your suite of benefits looks like. From there — and based on the information you gathered during your demo — you’ll know what is required to get your platform of choice up and running. For example, you might need to engage your IT team to help with any necessary integrations.

Then, you’ll need to encourage utilization of the platform during open enrollment periods, for new employees who are onboarding, and for employees who are leaving and need to sign up for COBRA. To get employees to make their benefits elections before your open enrollment period ends, we recommend a variety of touch-points, including:

Software Training Sessions: If you're using a new system, you're going to need to train your HR or People Ops team on setting up and managing each benefit. Then, you'll need to introduce the platform to your employees so they know how to use it. You could do this a number of ways:

• Ask your vendor if they have pre-recorded training videos that you can share with your employees
• Meet with individual teams to walk them through the platform
• Give a brief demo of the platform at an all-staff meeting‍

All-Staff Emails: Send a note to the entire company at the beginning of open enrollment with instructions on how to use the platform, what actions they need to take by the deadline, what happens if they don't do anything, etc. Then follow-up with "last-call" reminders as the deadline approaches.‍

Engage Team Leads: Ask team leads and managers to remind their direct reports to make their benefits selections before the deadline.

What is benefits administration software?

Benefits administration software are platforms built specifically to plan and provide benefits packages to employees, while also maintaining compliance with government regulations.

Why use benefits administration software?

Benefits administration software streamlines all benefits operations, saving your HR team much needed time. In addition, all employee benefits data is held in one portal, meaning you can analyze all benefits information and create detailed reports about what benefits are used most or least. This provides you with valuable action points for benefits administration. Finally, letting software maintain compliance for you ensures simple, fast, and accurate reports to the IRS and other government entities.

What are some features of benefits administration software?

Features of benefits administration software include reporting, ACA and COBRA compliance, onboarding tools, plan configuration, self-service portal, online enrollment, and payroll integrations.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to get benefits admin support: a platform that only focuses on benefits admin or a more comprehensive Human Capital Management (HCM) suite that offers benefits admin as one of many HR features. 

So, you’ll need to figure out which one will make the most sense for your company. We recommend demoing a couple vendors that fit into these two buckets so you can see how their solutions and features align with your needs and budget.