Open Enrollment Elections Collector: Run OE Without the Spreadsheet Scramble

The problem this kills

Open enrollment season is the same chaos every year. You email a PDF of the plan options, a fillable election form, and a dependent worksheet. People misread the tiers, elect a plan they aren't eligible for, add a dependent who ages out, or forget to enroll entirely. You spend weeks chasing stragglers by email, then spend the deadline weekend reconciling half-legible forms into one master spreadsheet for the carrier and another for payroll — praying the deduction math matches.

It doesn't have to be a scramble. Everything you need to make OE calm and clean is knowable up front: who's eligible, what they can elect, what each tier costs, what the dependent rules are, and when the window closes. You just need something that shows each employee only their real options, validates what they submit, tells you exactly who hasn't finished, and turns the approved elections into the exact files your carrier and payroll system expect. You do not need to be a developer to build that something.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your benefits team and your employees. You load your plan options and costs by tier, your eligible-employee roster, your dependent and waiver rules, and an enrollment window. When you open the window, each employee logs in and sees only the plans they're eligible for, picks their elections, adds dependents (validated against your rules), or records a waiver — and the tool computes their per-paycheck deduction as they go. A live dashboard shows completion against the deadline and sends automatic reminders to anyone who hasn't finished. Then the human gate: you review each submitted election and its dependents for completeness, approve the good ones, and return anything incomplete or conflicting. On approval — and only then — the tool produces a carrier enrollment file and a payroll-deduction file in the exact columns your systems expect.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you run OE today, the carriers and payroll/HRIS system you feed, the exact plans and tiers and costs you offer, your eligibility and dependent rules, whether you run passive or active enrollment, your default and waiver handling, and your messiest edge cases (mid-year hires, domestic partners, dependents aging out). It reads a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then builds the tool around your plans and rules instead of a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the roster and plan imports, the employee election experience with live deduction math, completion tracking and reminders, the review-and-approve gate, and the carrier + payroll exports. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls real benefits administration needs: login so only your team and your employees can use it, row-level security so each employee sees only their own elections and each admin sees only their own organization, a complete audit trail of every election, change, approval, and waiver (who, what, when), a hard human-approval gate so nothing reaches the carrier or payroll until a benefits admin reviews and signs off, deadline and default-rule enforcement (passive vs active), and a duplicate guard so each employee has exactly one election set per plan year. The whole tool exists to make a careful human review easy — employees submit, the admin approves, and only then does it commit.

Who it's for

Benefits administrators and HR generalists who run open enrollment via PDFs and email and spend weeks chasing stragglers and rebuilding spreadsheets. If you can describe your plans, your tiers, and your dependent rules, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be opening your first tailored enrollment window this weekend.