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Case study · Employee benefits

Census Connect

A payroll-connected eligibility, proposal and enrollment engine for pre-tax benefits programs. It takes an employer from raw census data to enrolled and verified employees, then keeps every month in sync.

Sector
Employee benefits & HR technology
Our role
Product, engineering, integration & operations
Users
Operators, employers & channel partners
Status
In production
01 / The challenge

The savings are real only if payroll is exactly right.

Pre-tax benefits programs can put real money back into employees' paychecks and cut employer payroll taxes. But the savings depend on getting thousands of small details right, on every paycheck.

Employers run on many different payroll platforms, often with several legal entities under a single login. Every new hire, termination, rehire, leave, transfer and pay change can change who is eligible and what should be deducted. When this is managed with spreadsheets and email, the program drifts, and the mistakes show up on employees' paychecks.

Our client needed a platform that could connect to the employer's own payroll, do the modeling, carry out enrollment and keep everything reconciled month after month. Employers and partners had to be able to trust the numbers.

02 / What we built

From census to verified enrollment, and every month after.

01

Census intake

Connect directly to the employer's payroll platform or upload a census file, and AI maps the columns. Employers with several legal entities are handled from day one.

02

Proposal engine

Models each employee's take-home change and the employer's payroll-tax savings, works out eligibility automatically, and produces branded PDF and Excel proposals for each entity and for the whole group.

03

Enrollment into payroll

Writes approved elections into payroll and checks them against payroll's own reports. Every write has a pilot phase and a kill switch.

04

Monthly change cycle

Each period, the roster is re-read and compared with the verified enrollment record. Every change is classified, explained in plain language and sent to the person who needs to act on it.

05

Employer portal

Dashboard, change review, scheduling, reports and a full activity log, with admin and viewer roles scoped to specific entities.

06

Partner-ready

White-label instances for channel partners, and secure embedding inside a partner's own client journey using single-use, short-lived session tokens.

03 / In the product

Clear decisions for employers. A full audit trail for everyone.

Illustrative screens with fictional data.

04 / Engineering principles

Built so that nothing guesses.

When software touches people's paychecks, being clever matters less than being right. These rules shaped every part of the platform.

Ambiguity becomes a question, never an assumption

Any record that can't be matched with certainty becomes an open item for a person to resolve. Nothing is written to payroll on a guess.

Privacy by design

Employees are identified without Social Security numbers. Birth dates, home addresses and other sensitive fields are never stored, because the workflow doesn't need them.

A history that can't be edited

Every decision, status change and transmission is recorded in an append-only log that can be exported at any time. Nothing disappears without a trace.

Verify every write

Every change pushed into payroll is checked against payroll's own reports. New capabilities go live behind a pilot phase and a kill switch.

Plain language, enforced

Text that clients see is checked automatically, so engineering jargon never reaches an employer and the platform never promises a date that has already passed.

Employers moved from reconciling spreadsheets to a governed monthly cycle. Changes are found automatically, decided in a portal, written into payroll and verified, with a full audit trail behind every step.

Benefits, payroll & HR tech

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