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Every renewal season, some brokers complete a small-group renewal, send the employer a rate sheet and a folder of SBCs, and then spend two weeks answering forwarded emails that all ask the same thing. Other brokers complete the same renewal with the same carriers and the same rates, and send the employer one page per employee, each showing that person, by name, what each plan will take out of their paycheck. The second group of employees walks into open enrollment already knowing their answer.
The gap between those two outcomes is translation. A renewal speaks in monthly premiums and percentage changes on a composite or age-banded rate table. An employee speaks in paychecks, and the only line that matters to them reads something like “$4.89 more (11%)” next to their current plan. When nobody does that translation, HR does it at the front desk under pressure, or employees re-pick the plan they already know.
This post walks through Employee Worksheets, an add-on to PlansightAI™ designed for community-rated small-group medical. It covers what each employee sees, how the numbers stay tied to the quotes you already built, where the broker stays in control, and the limits you should know before you turn it on.
A community-rated renewal is clear to the person who built it. To the employee, it is a grid of rates by tier or by age, a contribution rule they have never read, and a pay schedule nobody mentioned. To compare two plans, they would need to know their age on the date coverage starts, which family members are covered, how the employer’s contribution applies to each plan, and how many paychecks there are in the year.
An employee cannot compare plans they cannot price, and most cannot price a community-rated plan from a rate table.
Generic enrollment material does not fix this. Plansight has made the case that the printed benefits booklet is routinely unread, and a one-size-fits-all rate sheet fails for the same reason: it hands the employee the math instead of the answer. The employer feels the result first, as a line of people outside HR, and the brokerage feels it second, as a client who remembers open enrollment as the hard part of the renewal.
The fix is not more explanation. It is one page per person, already priced, that answers the only question the employee came with.
Building that page by hand is why it rarely exists. Someone opens the census, calculates each employee’s age as of the effective date, adds each covered family member, applies the contribution rule plan by plan, divides by pay periods, and formats the result. Then the employer moves the contribution by twenty dollars, and every sheet is wrong.
For a group of 30 lives, nobody on the benefits team has those hours during renewal season. Plansight customers already save 4.25 hours per small-group renewal with PlansightAI, and the worksheets are built so that open enrollment does not quietly hand those hours back.
PlansightAI builds a worksheet for every employee on the census from one menu, sorted by last name, and the broker reviews the stack instead of building it.
In Benefit Builder, the broker opens the menu in any package column, the Renewal column, or any alternate column, and chooses Employee Worksheets. The sheets open in a new tab. Plansight walked through how this fits into the full small-group workflow, from an empty record to elected plans in force, during a webinar on rebuilding community-rated renewals.
Each sheet carries the employer’s logo and name, the plan year, and the date coverage starts, with the brokerage’s logo in the footer under Prepared by. It lists who is covered, with each person’s age on the effective date, and then shows where the employee is today: their current plan and what they pay for it.
Below that, every community-rated plan in the package appears, with network, carrier, metal level, deductible, out-of-pocket maximum, doctor visits, specialist visits, hospital stays, and generic drugs. Each plan shows what the employee pays per paycheck, with the monthly amount underneath on non-monthly schedules, and the change from today, first in dollars, then as a percent.
Every sheet answers one question: what will this cost me, and answers it in the employee’s own name.
Two tags do quiet but important work. “Your plan next year” marks the renewal of the plan they currently hold, and any benefit that changed shows what it was changed to. “Lowest cost to you” marks the cheapest choice. A QR code on each plan opens that plan’s SBC from paper or PDF without a login. All of it pulls from the package you built in Benefit Builder, where elections and real-time budgeting already live.
Premium is only half of a plan choice. The other half is what happens in a bad year, and that is the half employees most often skip.
Each sheet shows a worst-year figure: the sum of payroll deductions and the plan’s in-network out-of-pocket maximum, using the family maximum when the employee covers family. A cost range bar under each price runs dark for a healthy year and light up to the worst year, on the same scale for every plan on the sheet.
A low premium only looks like a good deal until the employee sees what a bad year costs on the same plan.
The sheets also handle the cases that usually slip through. Employees who waive today get a sheet too, priced as Just you, plus With your family when the census lists family members. A plan with no rate shows “Rate not available” rather than a zero, so no one mistakes a gap for a price. Good to know flags any child turning 26 during the plan year. Every sheet carries the line “Estimates for planning. Your actual payroll deduction is set when you enroll,” and each employee sees only their own information.
A handout that disagrees with the proposal is worse than no handout. Employee Worksheets price enrolled employees from the same per-employee community rates and the same contribution rules shown on the Quotes grid, composite and age-banded alike, with each plan using its own rate type.
When the employer’s contribution is tied to a base plan, PlansightAI applies the same dollars to every plan for a given person: what the employer would pay for that person on the base plan, never more than the plan’s premium.
The worksheet is not a second set of numbers. It is the package the employer just approved, priced for each person.
The sheets use whatever is selected in the package right now, saved or not. That matters in the room. When the employer moves a contribution or swaps a plan mid-meeting, the same live modeling that cuts days of back-and-forth between HR and finance carries straight through to the handout, and the broker regenerates the stack before the meeting ends.
The settings panel docks beside the sheets, and every choice is the broker’s. Set the pay schedule, then build the full stack or a single employee. On Enrollment, choose a sign-up form with plan checkboxes, waiver boxes and signature lines, or an information-only handout, then set when and where it goes back and what happens if an employee makes no choice. On Costs, show or hide the employer’s share, describe the contribution in words, and note any employer HSA money. On Messages, add a note of up to 1,000 characters plus a contact email and phone. On Colors, set the accent; text and QR codes stay dark enough to read and scan.
PlansightAI does the pricing and the layout, and the broker decides what the employer hands out.
The panel counts aren't reflected on the sheets yet, so you know when to click Update. Print or save as a letter-size PDF. A few limits are worth stating plainly. It is an add-on, so ask your Plansight account manager if you do not see it. It covers community-rated medical only, not dental or vision, and fully insured or self-funded plan groups show a message instead. Once employees elect, the Brite integration carries sold plan data into enrollment guides without retyping.
Small group clients rarely judge a renewal by the rate you negotiated. They judge it by how open enrollment felt: whether employees understood their options, whether HR spent a week fielding questions, whether anyone was surprised by a deduction in the first paycheck of the plan year.
That experience is mostly out of the broker’s hands, unless the broker puts the answer in front of every employee before they ask. A personal worksheet does that. It shows today against tomorrow, cheap against safe, and premium against a bad year, in dollars per paycheck, for one person at a time.
The work behind it used to make it impractical for a thirty-life group. With PlansightAI building the sheets from the employer-approved package, the broker spends that time on the conversation rather than the arithmetic.
Plansight is the only AI application that manages your benefits renewal and marketing workflow. See how PlansightAI takes a community-rated small group from renewal open to plans in force, including a worksheet for every employee, built from the package your client approves and reviewed by your team before it goes out.
If you haven’t seen Plansight in action and you want to, book a discovery call with us.
At the end of the day, Plansight is more than just an application. It is a partner built with brokerages and their benefits teams in mind. Plansight is the only AI application that manages your benefits renewal and marketing workflow. It brings transparency, consistency, and time savings to every group renewal.
From SmartSheetingAI™ to RFP automation to side-by-side comparisons to the intelligence of PlansightAI™, everything we create is designed to lighten the load, reduce risk, and elevate your client relationships. Your team is your greatest asset, and Plansight is here to make sure they have the tools, insights, and support to shine.
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