Employee benefit guide generator

Software that produces open enrollment guides for employees

Planlined generates an employee benefit guide from the reviewed case used for the proposal. Start with approved carrier plan data, set the enrollment dates and pay frequency, review employee costs, then export a PDF or publish a hosted guide. The benefit guide gallery shows the available designs and builder workflow.

For a downloadable layout example, inspect the free Word booklet template and fictional PDF example. Those are prepared template resources, not evidence of an automated extraction run. To inspect an actual saved-case proposal export and its source-review limitations, use the separate medical worked example.

What goes into an employee Benefit Guide

A finished guide covers the same five things without exception: a plan summary for every line of coverage offered; the options set out side by side so an employee can compare deductible, out-of-pocket maximum and visit costs at a glance; numbered enrollment steps with the dates, deadline and portal to use; eligibility rules and benefits contacts; and the FAQs and plan notices the client is required to distribute.

From carrier documents to a finished guide

Start with the SBCs, carrier quotes and rate sheets. Document parsing brings extracted plan fields into review; corrections or manual entry may be needed, and source-page links may be unresolved. Check the important values against the originals, then build the guide from the approved plan comparison. Choose a theme, apply the client's branding, and review the PDF or hosted guide before sharing. See the benefit guide feature for the theme gallery, inputs, outputs and pricing.

What to collect before you start building

The guide is downstream of the proposal, so most of its raw material already exists in the case. Three things usually do not, and chasing them mid-build is what turns a short job into a long one:

• The enrollment window and the effective date. Not "November" — the open and close dates, and the date coverage begins. Employees plan around the deadline.
• The enrollment portal and how employees reach it. The URL, whether they need a code, and who resets a password at 9pm the night before the deadline.
• The benefits contacts. Who at the employer answers eligibility questions, and who at your agency answers plan questions, with the channel each prefers.

Also settle the pay frequency before you build. Semi-monthly payroll has 24 pay periods a year; biweekly payroll usually has 26. Divide the annual employee contribution by the actual number of pay periods, then check the displayed per-paycheck cost.

The page order that works

Employees do not read a benefit guide front to back. They open it looking for one answer, so the order should follow the questions in the sequence they are actually asked:

1. What is changing this year. If something changed, say so on page one. Everything else reads differently once an employee knows whether their plan survived.
2. Am I eligible, and who can I cover? Waiting periods, dependent rules, and what counts as a qualifying life event.
3. What are my medical options, side by side? Deductible, out-of-pocket maximum and the visit costs, in one grid.
4. What does each option cost me per paycheck? By coverage tier, on the real pay schedule.
5. What else is offered? Dental, vision, life and disability, each with its own short summary.
6. How do I enroll, and by when? Numbered steps, the portal, the deadline.
7. Who do I ask? Contacts, FAQs, and the plan notices the employer is required to distribute.

The ordering principle is that cost comes immediately after coverage. A guide that puts the plan grid on page four and the paycheck figures on page eleven forces every employee to do their own cross-referencing, and many of them will guess instead.

Write it for an employee, not for the committee

The proposal is written for a buyer who compares programs for a living. The guide is read by a warehouse supervisor on a phone during a break. The same facts need different language.

• Define the three words that do the most damage — deductible, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum — in one plain sentence each, the first time they appear.
• Use the plan names employees actually say, not the carrier's marketing names, and keep the carrier's exact network name next to them for when somebody calls a provider.
• Prefer a worked situation to an explanation: what an urgent care visit costs on each plan says more than a paragraph about cost sharing.
• Keep the required plan notices, but keep them at the back. They are obligations, not the reading experience.
• Where a notice is required, confirm the current list and timing against the DOL reporting and disclosure guide rather than last year's guide.

A worked example: Ridgeline Components

Ridgeline Components Inc is the sample case Planlined ships with — medical alongside dental, vision, life and disability. Once the proposal is approved, the guide follows in one pass:

1. Start from the approved case, so the plan grid and the rates are the ones the employer signed off on rather than a fresh transcription.
2. Set the plan year, the enrollment window and the effective date, then apply Ridgeline's logo and brand color — the employer's brand, not your agency's, because employees are being asked to act by their employer.
3. Rename plans the way Ridgeline's staff refer to them, and switch off the sections that do not apply to this group.
4. Set the pay frequency and check per-paycheck figures against the annual employee cost for each plan and coverage tier you will publish.
5. Write the enrollment steps against the portal Ridgeline actually uses, with the deadline stated as a date, not a number of days.
6. Run the readiness check, then export the PDF and publish the link.

Common mistakes

• Quoting monthly premiums. Employees think in paychecks; a monthly figure reads as an error or a price increase.
• Reusing last year's guide as the base. It carries last year's dates, last year's network names and the plan that was dropped in July.
• Putting the agency's logo where the employer's belongs. It turns an HR communication into a sales piece.
• Sending a PDF only. Employees read it on a phone; a hosted link they can open anywhere gets used, an 18 MB attachment often does not.
• Copying network names loosely. Employees discover the difference at the provider's front desk, and the call comes to you.
• Leaving the deadline implicit. "Two weeks from the kickoff meeting" is not a date anybody can act on in November.

What to check before you send it

Four fields cause most of the corrections that come back after a guide goes out: the plan effective date, the employee contribution figure per pay period (not the monthly premium), the network name exactly as the carrier spells it on the SBC, and any plan the client dropped before the renewal was finalized. Confirm those four against the source document before you export.

If you build guides by hand today

If you're still assembling the guide in a page layout tool or a long Word document, the employee benefits booklet template lays out the page-by-page structure and print specs, and the employee benefit guide template article walks through the same structure with worked examples. If you are new to the case-first workflow the guide comes out of, start with the quick start guide, set your look once using the proposal branding guide, and see product facts for exactly what Planlined reads and produces.