Benefits Life-Event Change Tracker

The problem this kills

An employee messages you: "I got married last month - can I add my spouse to my health plan?" Another one says a baby arrived, someone else just got divorced, and a fourth lost coverage from a partner's job. Each one is a qualifying life event with its own rules: which elections they're allowed to change, what documents prove the event, and a strict deadline (often 30 days) to act.

Right now this lives in your inbox and your head. Nothing tracks the deadline. Documents arrive as random attachments. You re-check the rules from memory every time. And the scary part is that a missed window or a change that doesn't match the event can mean a denied claim or a compliance headache months later.

This tool turns that mess into a clean, deadline-aware, documented process - without you waiting on IT or buying a benefits suite.

What you'll build

A small private web app your benefits team logs into. Employees (or you on their behalf) submit a life event through a simple form. The tool immediately checks whether the request is inside the allowed change window, shows only the changes that event actually permits, and collects the exact documents that event requires. It drafts the resulting election change and parks it in a review queue.

Nothing reaches your carrier or payroll automatically. A benefits admin opens the request, confirms the documentation and the eligibility window, and approves it. Only then does the tool produce the carrier/payroll change file. Out-of-window requests are flagged loudly so you decide how to handle them - they never sneak through.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), and it builds the tool with you step by step - no coding experience needed.

It opens by interviewing you about your actual benefits process - your event types, your real document requirements, your deadline rules, your election names, your peak volumes (think open enrollment season and new-baby clusters), and your messy exceptions. It reads back a short tailored spec and waits for your thumbs-up, so what gets built fits your plan documents - not a generic template.

From there it walks you through standing up the database, the intake form with live window-checking, document uploads, the draft-change logic, the admin review-and-approve queue, the carrier/payroll export, and email notifications - each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your benefits team can get in.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own employees and events.
• A full audit trail - who submitted, who verified, who approved, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts the election change, but a benefits admin must verify the documents and the window and approve before any carrier/payroll file is produced.
• Duplicate guards - the same employee plus event date can't be processed twice, so one event never creates two conflicting changes.
• Window enforcement - late requests are flagged, not silently accepted.

This is benefits administration, not benefits or legal advice - the tool enforces your rules and keeps a human in charge.

Who it's for

Benefits admins and HR generalists who field ad hoc "can I change my benefits?" requests with no consistent process and no reliable deadline tracking. If you can fill out a form and follow steps, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.