HR

Open enrollment, in plain English.

Book a Workzoom walkthrough → 25+ years of HR and payroll production. Live in Canada, the US, and the Bahamas.

Open enrollment is the annual window when employees can change benefit elections without a qualifying life event.

Read the full answer

It compresses a year of benefits decisions into a short, fixed period, exposing weak eligibility data fast. Workzoom Benefits runs it through self-service, with eligibility-driven plan menus and a payroll preview before elections submit.

How Open enrollment works.

During the window, employees see plan options filtered by their eligibility rules, make selections, and submit before a hard deadline that maps to the new plan year start date. Elections don't take effect the day they're entered. They take effect on the plan year start, so anything entered ahead of the deadline still needs to route to payroll as a future deduction change, not an immediate one. Employees who don't submit anything usually default to current elections or a plan-defined fallback, and that default has to be documented, not assumed.

Where Open enrollment goes wrong.

  1. Collecting elections in a form or spreadsheet and re-keying them into payroll under deadline pressure is where most errors enter.
  2. Employees on leave during the window are easy to miss entirely, since they may never receive the enrollment materials that go out through normal channels. And the pay period that straddles the plan year boundary is a common place to apply the wrong deduction amount, either the old plan year's rate too late or the new one too early.
  • 2000 Running payroll since Workzoom has run Canadian payroll for 25+ years.
  • Canadian data residency AWS Canada (ca-central-1). Canadian customer data stays in Canada.
  • SOC 2-aligned controls Encrypted at rest, role-based access, immutable audit logs.
  • Trusted in production County of Renfrew, Silvera for Seniors, and Cable Bahamas. Built for 50 to 5,000 employees.

Keep reading

Related terms.

Questions about Open enrollment

Open enrollment is the annual window when employees can change benefit elections without a qualifying life event. It compresses a year of benefits decisions into a short, fixed period, exposing weak eligibility data fast. Workzoom Benefits runs it through self-service, with eligibility-driven plan menus and a payroll preview before elections submit.
During the window, employees see plan options filtered by their eligibility rules, make selections, and submit before a hard deadline that maps to the new plan year start date. Elections don't take effect the day they're entered. They take effect on the plan year start, so anything entered ahead of the deadline still needs to route to payroll as a future deduction change, not an immediate one. Employees who don't submit anything usually default to current elections or a plan-defined fallback, and that default has to be documented, not assumed.
Collecting elections in a form or spreadsheet and re-keying them into payroll under deadline pressure is where most errors enter.

Workzoom

Run HR, payroll, workforce, and talent on one platform.

$4 per employee per suite. 50 to 5,000 employees. Sprint-based, client-paced go-live.

Book a Walkthrough View Pricing