Best Employee Benefit Plans

An employee’s compensation package includes more than just the salary—it also includes other perks, like health insurance, paid time off, and retirement plans. 

As a business owner, you can profoundly shape your staff’s life by providing generous employee benefit plans. But before you do that, you have to take care of the hard bits, involving financial planning, choosing good benefits, and so on.

Luckily, you can use intuitive benefits administration software that tailor-make excellent employee benefit plans to attract and retain top-level talent. Read on as we discuss the five best tools that make employee benefits planning effortless and easy.

The Top 5 Best Employee Benefit Plans

1. Gusto — Best for Companies With Limited Workforces
2. Zenefits — The Best for On-the-Go Access
3. GoCo — Best for Automatic Benefits Enrollment
4. ADP — Best for Companies With More Than 50 Employees 
5. BambooHR — Best for Tracking Benefits 

Wondering which one would make the best fit for your employees? Read on as we discuss these software tools in more detail below.

#1 — Gusto — Best for Companies With Limited Workforces

If you’re looking for a one-stop solution to handle hiring and onboarding, time-tracking, payroll, and employee benefits for your small business, look no further than Gusto.

This renowned payroll software solution also lets you build customized employee benefits plans for your staff that go beyond the basics. Choose from health and financial benefits like health insurance, HSAs and FSAs, reimbursement plan, vision, dental, 401(k), cash accounts and pay advances, or commuter benefits. 

What’s more, Gusto provides you with licensed advisors to help pick the perfect fit for your team, smoothening the process further.

Although Gusto’s solutions support businesses of all sizes, we particularly recommend it for small businesses with a limited workforce. Its Concierge plan provides unrestricted access to HR professionals, meaning small entities can reduce or eliminate the need to hire in-house HR specialists. In turn, this helps them save some serious amounts of money. 

The fact the software is intuitive and easy to use makes your entrepreneurial life even easier.

Pricing

Gusto currently offers four plans:

• Core — $6 per person, plus $39 monthly base price
• Complete — $12 per month per person, plus a $39 monthly base price
• Concierge — $5 per month per person, plus $949 monthly base price
• Contractor — $6 per person

#2 — Zenefits — The Best for On-the-Go Access

Zenefits is a dedicated HRIS solution designed for SMBs and startups that offer a host of comprehensive HR solutions, ranging from benefits administration to performance management to document management. 

It’s optimized for providing a good user experience, giving you a detailed overview of all your employee data and records. 

Zenefits’ People Platform includes a robust offering that combines advisory services and integrated partner apps to simplify HR administration. You get access to an impressive set of functionalities, including intuitive administration features and flexible add-ons, complemented by access to actual human advisers.

Other capabilities include business intelligence, hiring and onboarding, integrated payroll, taxation and filing, and compensation management.

Zenefits also has a native mobile app that lets employees access benefits information from anywhere. That said, the app doesn’t support many admin tasks, which may be problematic for people who tend to travel a lot. It’s still highly responsive and stores employee data, helping you manage your workforce more efficiently.

Pricing

Zenefits offers three, highly-affordable pricing plans:

• Essentials — $8 per month, per employee
• Growth — $14 per month, per employee
• Zen — $21 per month, per employee

You’ll have to pay an extra $5 if you want to administer benefits using your own broker. A 14-day free trial is also available.

#3 — GoCo — Best for Automatic Benefits Enrollment

GoCo comes with an interactive and configurable dashboard that has all the bells and whistles one would typically expect in HR software.

You get a complete HR suite, including real-time applicant tracking, onboarding, performance management, payroll, and benefits administration. Along with the usual features, you also get PTO management, time tracking, employee data management, employee lifestyle management, and access to several insurance brokers.

GoCo lets you fully automate the benefits enrollment process—all you have to do is add the insurance carriers, health plans, and other benefit sources. Set up the usual benefits like health insurance and life insurance, and the system will automatically assign them to the right employees.

You can manage all benefits—health plans, HSA, disability, FSA, 401(k), HRA, and commuter benefits—in a single spot.

Employers can opt for self-service benefits enrollment that allows them to compare eligible plans and costs at a glance. Third-party integration with benefits providers (benefits syncing) or with the previous benefits administrators is another option.

Pricing

GoCo’s plans start from $5 per employee per month, but they offer customized employee benefits plans built around your specific needs.

You can also schedule a free demo with GoCo to test drive their software.

#4 — ADP — Best for Companies With More Than 50 Employees 

ADP is a popular benefits system for companies with 50 or more employees, and not without reason. 

This software can handle practically every benefit your company could offer. From common benefits like health insurance and 401(k) to less prominent perks like pet insurance and built-in employee rewards programs, ADP does it all.

Its user-friendly and interactive dashboard gives you at-a-glance access to all information, including your compliance status and eligibility requirements. As a result, you can develop benefits plans, manage your benefits budget, and compare benefit providers easily.

And that’s just half of its capabilities.

ADP is essentially an HR software application that also offers payroll, time and attendance tracking, and talent management in addition to employee benefits management. You can integrate it with renowned systems like QuickBooks, Xero, and Concur to further streamline your processes.

Plus, it has 2,500+ experts to continually monitor changes in regulations and compliance practices to ensure all its clients remain compliant. 

There’s a dedicated mobile app with an employee self-service portal to allow employees to check their paychecks, W2s, time cards, benefits, and other data. Thanks to this feature, your staff can enroll for benefits themselves.

Pricing

ADP has customizable pricing that is provided upon request. You’ll have to contact the sales team through its website for more information.

#5 — BambooHR — Best for Tracking Benefits 

BambooHR is another capable HR solution that focuses on broad-spectrum benefit administration. It’s targeted at small businesses that want all their processes centralized.

You can use it to track, check, and manage historical information, including cost, enrolment, coverage, and past providers. 

Additionally, BambooHR has one of the best benefit tracking tools that enables you to track benefit plans across 12 different benefit types for different employee groups. This includes custom package differentiation, date scheduling for coverage changes, and healthcare package history records.

The software hosts a PTO tracking program, along with payroll and time tracking software. There’s also a dedicated compliance tracker to keep you in the loop about different applicable regulations, such as ACA compliance.

Overall, BambooHR’s varied functionality is a great option for those wanting to streamline their software systems, collect relevant administrative information under one umbrella, and track their employees’ benefits.

Pricing

BambooHR has customizable pricing that is provided upon request. You’ll have to contact the sales team through its website for more information.

How to Find the Best Employee Benefit Plans for You

Developing employee benefit plans is one of the more important tasks you do as a business owner. You must get this right if you want to attract and retain top-level talent. Below, I’ll show you how to select software that offers the right benefit plans for your staff.

Offers Intuitive Self-Service Portal With Mobile Access

The best employee benefits software has a self-service portal to help employees customize their own benefit plans, guiding them through the whole process. Considering many leading benefits administration software come with intuitive self-service portals, you won’t be strapped for options.

Besides this, an intuitive user interface and setup process, as well as an intuitive admin dashboard, are equally important. Easy mobile access is another crucial aspect, so look for software that can help implement a mobile system that’s easy to use for both employees and administrators.

Stable Connections With Insurance Carriers

Your prospective benefit software should have stable connections with reputable insurance carriers. This is necessary to ensure your employees are fully covered in case of unfortunate circumstances.

Benefits systems connect with insurance companies based on factors like your organization’s maturity, the technology you use, and your particular carries. They do this using either the form enrollment (virtual filing of PDF forms with your employees’ data), consensus enrollment (sending spreadsheets containing employee data to insurance carriers), or the EDI (electronic data interchange) connection with her.

Talk to the prospective software’s customer support to understand how deep-rooted is the relationship between them and the insurance carriers.

Consider the HR Experience

Considering your HR department will be interacting with the system much more frequently, you must prioritize your HR’s experience when choosing a benefits administrator.

The idea is to have an optimized HR system that can leverage technology to handle time-consuming, manual, and data-intensive HR tasks.

Therefore, an attractive interface isn’t enough. The system should also have excellent reporting, data management, and other HR functionalities to be truly useful to the HR department. Look for a software tool that can automate data entry, benefits administration, and reporting.

Easy Integration With Existing Systems

It’s nearly impossible to have a system that operates all your HR processes from a single benefit platform. It’s why you need a solution that can sync with numerous HR platforms and payroll providers seamlessly to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine whether a prospective software would be a good fit for your organization:

• Can the new system sync with the payroll and other HR systems you typically use?
• How much legwork is involved to set them up to sync? Do you have to pay for that time? Or is the service included in the cost of the system?
• Will the systems sync in real-time? If not, how often?

Data Security 

When developing an employee benefit plan, you only have to enter tons of sensitive information, such as employee data, claims made, and health-related cost receipts. Naturally, you don’t want to compromise on the security of the data.

Find out about the prospective system method of keeping employee data secure. Enquire about how data is stored and how it’s transmitted to insurance providers. Implementing a quality system will protect you from cyberattacks, so the security level is something you don’t want to compromise on—at all.

Compliance Assurance 

You should be able to use the software to personalize the benefits plan without fearing falling out of compliance.

Pick a benefits system that helps you comply with all relevant regulations, such as ACA, HIPAA, and COBRA. With automated compliance checks in place, you won’t have to worry about compliance errors when customizing plans to individual employees’ needs and preferences. 

You can have software to keep track of the number of hours your employees have worked, which, in turn, will help you categorize as a small business or as large business employees in regards to ACA reporting.

Summary 

Attracting and retaining top-level talent can become considerably easier—provided you offer the best employee benefit plans that can successfully keep your staff happy in the long run.

Gusto and Zenefits give you access to the best employee benefits, thanks to their wide use-cases and well-rounded HR abilities. But even if you choose another software from my above list, you’re assured of effortless benefits administration, helping keep your staff and HR professionals happy.