The price of a benefits platform is easy to put on a spreadsheet, but the labor cost created when transactions fail to process cleanly is much harder to see.
Eligibility disputes, reimbursement requests and reconciliation errors eventually land with someone in HR or benefits administration. Individually, those cases may take only a few minutes. Across thousands of accounts, however, they can create a recurring expense that never appears on a vendor invoice.
A new PYMNTS Intelligence report produced with SoFi Tech Solutions illustrates how quickly that burden can accumulate.
Its model assumes a benefits program with 5,000 active accounts, with 5% requiring manual attention each month. That would produce 250 exceptions. At 15 minutes per case, employees would spend 62.5 hours resolving them, or 750 hours over a year. Using the report's assumed loaded labor cost of $45 an hour puts the value of that capacity at about $33,750 annually.
Those numbers are illustrative, not an industry benchmark. The report was produced with SoFi Tech Solutions, a payments technology provider, and says organizations should substitute their own exception volumes and usage rates rather than treat its assumptions as market averages. That caveat is also what makes the framework useful at renewal.
When an HSA, FSA or HRA administrator comes up for review, quoted fees and service levels tell only part of the cost story.
Three other numbers can reveal what the employer is absorbing internally: how many transactions or accounts require manual handling each month, how long each exception takes to resolve and what is causing them.
A lower-priced administrator could become more expensive in practice if repeated eligibility problems, reimbursement issues or reconciliation failures leave the employer doing more work. Conversely, higher technology costs could be partly offset if fewer transactions need human intervention.
The question carries weight in a large and still-growing market. Devenir counted 41.7 million HSAs holding nearly $174 billion at the end of 2025, with account numbers up 6% from a year earlier.
It also comes as employers are scrutinizing benefit spending more closely. Gallagher's 2026 Benefits Benchmarks survey of 3,717 US organizations found 36% experienced health plan premium increases of at least 10% at their most recent renewal, even after plan changes. That cost pressure has pushed benefits data further into renewal discussions, alongside greater scrutiny of what employers are getting for their spending.
Administrative workload is another part of that calculation.
Simply knowing the number of manual cases is not enough.
Repeated eligibility-file errors indicate a different problem from high volumes of reimbursement requests. Reconciliation discrepancies or failed data transfers point to others. Breaking exceptions down by cause can show whether the issue lies with plan design, employee behavior, system integration or the administrator itself.
That also gives employers a more practical way to test vendor claims around automation.
Real-time eligibility checks, automated spending controls and direct API connections can reduce some manual handoffs. But the relevant measure is not whether a provider says its platform is automated. It is how much work still comes back to the employer after implementation.
That distinction is already becoming more visible across group benefits. Carrier integrations are expanding, including Guardian's addition of eligibility and policy APIs with Rippling. Competitors are building connections across other benefits and HR platforms as carriers try to reduce manual data exchange.
For employers reviewing their current arrangement, straight-through processing offers a practical measure: what share of transactions completes without somebody having to intervene?
The PYMNTS model does not establish what a good exception rate should be. Its value is in showing how to measure the workload instead—and whether a platform that looks competitive on price is quietly shifting labor costs back onto the employer.
