Managed Benefits · Compared
Benefits administration software gives your team a better cockpit. A benefits administration service puts a pilot in it. Both get sold with the same screenshots, which is why so many companies buy the tool and discover they still own the job.
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The Three Models
Most comparisons stop at two boxes. There are three, and the third is the one nobody sells you until you ask.
| Dimension | Software | Services | Fully managed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Your team, using the tool | A vendor team, using their process | A dedicated team, using the same platform your data lives in |
| What is included | Enrollment engine, self-service portal, reporting | Enrollment execution, sometimes ACA or COBRA add-ons | Enrollment, ACA tracking and filing, COBRA, carrier feed monitoring, an auditing analyst |
| Effort on your team | High: configuration, exceptions, deadlines, fixes | Medium: oversight and approvals, less hands-on execution | Low: you review and decide, the team executes and watches the calendar |
| Cost shape | Per employee per month, published, predictable | Often quote-gated, scoped per project or per task | Per employee per month across three tiers, shown on screen in about 90 seconds |
| Best-fit company | Has HR hours and compliance knowledge in-house | Wants specific tasks (like COBRA) off its plate without switching systems | HR-of-one, multi-state, ACA-exposed, or just tired of owning the deadline |
The middle column, plain services, is where most confusion lives. A benefits administration service can mean a vendor that runs enrollment for you on their own system, or a broker-adjacent team that layers execution onto your existing software. Fully managed collapses that ambiguity: same platform, same data, a team embedded in it rather than bolted beside it.
Side By Side
| Task | Software alone | Managed service |
|---|---|---|
| Plan setup and configuration | Your team builds it in the tool | Built and maintained for you |
| Open enrollment | Your team plans, launches, chases, and closes it | Run start to finish by a dedicated team |
| Life events and changes | Employee self-service, your team resolves exceptions | Handled, including the exceptions |
| Carrier updates and data feeds | Your team monitors and fixes breaks | Monitored and corrected for you |
| ACA tracking and Forms 1094-C and 1095-C | Extra modules, your team files | Tracked and produced as a defined feature |
| COBRA and state continuation | Often a separate vendor your team coordinates | Scoped into the same service |
| Data errors and audits | Found when something breaks | An auditing analyst checks proactively on the top tier |
| Who owns the deadline | You do, every one of them | The service does the watching; you stay informed |
Compliance context: IRS, ACA information center for applicable large employers · U.S. Department of Labor, COBRA continuation coverage
The Real Differences
Good benefits administration software is genuinely good: employees enroll themselves, deductions sync to payroll, reporting stops living in spreadsheets. What it cannot do is show up. Somebody still configures plans, launches enrollment, answers the questions the tool generates, fixes the carrier feed that broke in March, and remembers that ACA filings exist. Software vendors sell the dashboard; the dashboard assumes an operator. If your team has that operator, with real hours and real compliance knowledge, software alone is a legitimate answer. The failure mode is buying the cockpit and assuming it flies itself.
A managed benefits administration service is the same system plus the operator: a team that runs enrollment start to finish, processes life events including the weird ones, watches carrier feeds, and produces the compliance work product. That last part is the heavy end. Applicable large employers owe annual ACA reporting on Forms 1094-C and 1095-C, per the IRS ALE information center, and COBRA imposes notice duties with statutory teeth, per the Department of Labor. A service turns those from calendar risks into someone's actual job description.
The honest comparison is not software price vs service price. It is software price plus the fraction of a person the software quietly requires, vs the service. At 25 to 500 employees that fraction usually hides inside an HR manager or office manager who also owns payroll, hiring, and everything else, which is exactly how notices slip and codes go wrong. The full version of that make-or-buy math, including when in-house genuinely wins, is worked through in outsourced vs in-house benefits administration. The short version: count the hours before you compare the invoices.
The market talks about this as a binary choice, but the real landscape is a spectrum: pure software on one end, a classic third-party administrator or fully managed service on the other, and tiered offerings in between that add ACA compliance or a dedicated team to a software core. The spectrum matters because your company moves along it. A 30-person company with simple plans sits comfortably at the software end; the same company at 80 employees, two states, and variable-hour ACA tracking has drifted toward the service end whether it noticed or not. Buy the model you are becoming, or buy a platform that lets you slide.
The Number Nobody Quotes
Software vendors price the license. Nobody prices the person. But every benefits administration platform assumes an operator, and that operator's time is a real cost even when it never appears on an invoice. Hiring a dedicated in-house benefits administrator to own configuration, enrollment, exceptions, and compliance filings typically runs $60,000 to $100,000 a year in fully loaded cost, depending on market and scope. Most companies under a few hundred employees do not make that hire. They absorb the work into an HR manager who already owns payroll, hiring, and onboarding, which means the benefits work gets done in the gaps, not on a schedule.
That gap-time work is where the real cost hides: a COBRA notice sent four days late, an ACA code entered wrong on a form the IRS will eventually ask about, a carrier feed error that silently drops a dependent for two pay cycles. None of that shows up as a line item. It shows up as a penalty letter, a benefits gap an employee discovers at the pharmacy counter, or a Friday afternoon spent reconciling a feed that should have synced itself. COBRA administration errors alone can cost a company roughly $110 per day per qualified beneficiary in exposure once a notice is missed, which adds up fast across even a handful of affected employees.
None of this means software is a bad buy. It means the honest price of software-only benefits administration is the license fee plus whatever fraction of a salaried person it quietly consumes, plus the tail risk of the one filing or notice that slips. A managed service prices that operator explicitly instead of hiding it inside someone else's job description.
The Actual Decision
Most companies do not sit cleanly in one column. That is exactly why BEG built three tiers on one platform instead of a single all-or-nothing product: Benefits Admin Software for teams in the left column, Software plus ACA Compliance for teams straddling the middle, and Fully Managed for teams solidly in the right.
Which Should You Choose
Software alone is a fair answer. Your team keeps control, the cost stays low, and you upgrade only if enrollment season or ACA volume starts eating the team. Be honest about the hours.
The service model fits. One person cannot run enrollment, chase carriers, and track ACA eligibility on top of everything else without something slipping, and the somethings that slip carry penalties.
Variable-hour staff, high turnover, or a past 226-J letter all point the same direction: you need eligibility tracked and forms produced as a service, not a module your team hopefully configures right.
Where BEG Fits
BEG Managed Benefits, powered by isolved, deliberately spans this whole page across three plans: Benefits Admin Software for teams that want the tool and already have the operator, Software plus ACA Compliance for teams that want the tool with the compliance filing work handled, and Fully Managed for teams that want a dedicated specialist and auditing analyst running the whole operation. You pick where on the spectrum you sit today and slide later without re-implementing, your broker stays your broker, BEG is not a PEO, and the monthly estimate for all three plans shows on screen in about 90 seconds instead of behind a demo. Details live on the Managed Benefits overview.
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Questions
Software gives your team a system to run enrollment, changes, and reporting themselves. A service puts people behind the system who do that work for you. Fully managed benefits administration is both: the software plus a dedicated team operating it. The difference in all three cases is who carries the workload, not what the screen looks like.
Sometimes. If someone on your team genuinely has the hours and knows the compliance calendar, software alone works. It stops working when enrollment season, COBRA notices, and ACA filings pile onto one busy person who already owns payroll and hiring.
No. Your broker keeps advising on plans and placing coverage. An administration service or fully managed provider runs the operations behind those plans. BEG is built explicitly as a broker ally, not a replacement, and is not a PEO.
Your company remains the employer and plan sponsor, so legal responsibility stays with you regardless of which model you pick. What changes is execution: a service or managed provider tracks the eligibility data, notices, and filings that create that exposure, per DOL and IRS rules.
Yes, and it is a common path. BEG Managed Benefits runs on one platform with three tiers, Benefits Admin Software, Software plus ACA Compliance, and Fully Managed, so moving up does not mean re-implementing or migrating data.
Software is usually priced per employee per month at published rates; services are usually quote-gated behind a sales call. BEG shows an instant on-screen monthly estimate for all three of its tiers instead of hiding pricing behind a demo.
It is the labor your team already absorbs: someone configuring plans, chasing carrier feed errors, answering employee questions the tool cannot, and tracking ACA deadlines. A full-time in-house hire to own this typically runs $60,000 to $100,000 a year in loaded cost, and that is before counting the hours a smaller team spends doing it on the side.
When the compliance calendar starts competing with the rest of your team's job. Signs include missed or late COBRA notices, uncertainty about ACA Applicable Large Employer status, carrier feed errors nobody catches until an employee complains, or an HR-of-one also running payroll and recruiting. At that point the software was never the gap; the operator was.
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