Benefits teams can spend more than a week of staff time every month handling transactions that don’t move cleanly through the system.

For a benefits program with 5,000 active accounts, the new PYMNTS Intelligence report produced with SoFi Tech Solutions titled “Making Health and Wellness Benefits Perform: What Modern Card Infrastructure Changes” models what happens when 5% of accounts require manual attention each month. At 15 minutes apiece, eligibility disputes, reimbursement requests and reconciliation exceptions add up to about 62.5 staff hours.

That makes benefits infrastructure an operational-efficiency calculation as much as a way to administer HSAs, FSAs and other programs. The data point to a cost that can be easy to miss when companies evaluate benefits technology: the employee time consumed after a transaction encounters a problem.

Benefits administration involves a series of processes around enrollment, allocation, spending, eligibility and reconciliation. The technology underneath the program determines how much of that activity happens automatically and how much lands on somebody’s desk.

In a 5,000-account example, a 5% monthly exception rate produces 250 cases requiring attention. Multiplying those cases by 15 minutes produces 62.5 hours of loaded staff time each month. A $45 hourly loaded labor rate puts the monthly cost at $2,813 and the annual amount above $33,750.

The dollar figure is useful, but the 62.5 hours may be the more consequential operating metric.

Benefits organizations don’t necessarily eliminate those employees when exceptions decline. They can redirect the capacity. Staff time previously spent investigating eligibility disputes, handling reimbursement requests or reconciling transactions can instead go toward monitoring program use, participant support and administering additional benefits.

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