Once October hits, there are two big things on our minds as a Client Success team: Open enrollment (we see you, HR professionals!) and preparing for end-of-year stipend reviews. 

As we race towards the end of the year, we wanted to remind you that this is the best time to reflect on the stipends you’re offering employees. We have been knee-deep ourselves in EOY reviews, as we offer this service to all of our clients so they can make sure that they’re maximizing the benefits of Compt for their people. Especially as budgets get tighter and employee expectations remain high, doing an end-of-year review is a great way to help you solidify your budget and benefits package for 2025.

 To start, consider these questions: 

• What has the highest enrollment?
• What are employees underutilizing?
• Is there anything you can add/remove to get a better program return?

We’ve put together an end-of-year stipend review checklist employers can use to answer all of these questions and more.

1. Double check your recurring stipends BEFORE the year ends.

The first thing you should do.

By default, recurring stipends will automatically continue and launch on January 1st if you don’t terminate them. What this means is that any stipends you’re offering today will be active next year unless you cancel them.

There will be some stipends you’ll want to cut altogether. Others, you’ll want to cut back on. And some, you might want to increase.

Reviewing them takes just a few minutes, and missing ones you wanted to cut can potentially cost the company thousands. It’s a critical step to protect your bottom line.

2. Look at your stipend utilization metrics.

To make the best decisions for your business, you’ll want to take inventory of which ones are worth keeping and which ones can be let go The perfect time to do this is your end-of-year stipend review, as you’ll have a full picture of the entire year.

In a recent interview with John Coleman, Senior Principal Consultant at Mercer, about the changing landscape of employee benefits and what it means for employers, he explained that, when it comes to maximizing the ROI of each benefit you’re offering, utilization is the first place to look.

“The first thing, and what I would say is the most important thing, is to look at your own data. If you have a utilization report, that tells you what is really driving your overall costs.”

Within your stipend software, you can look at the number and percentage of employees enrolled in each stipend, how many of them actually spend it, and how much of the total stipend is used (do they use the full amount, or not?).

For ROI purposes, also look at the average cost per employee on the respective stipend and the total amount spent on the stipend for the year.

3. Find solutions for stipends with low utilization rates.

Stipends can be better than extra money on a paycheck. But only when they’re the right stipends for your team.

Broadly speaking, there are three reasons employees aren’t using a stipend:

• They don’t know it exists or that they qualify.
• It’s not something they’re personally interested in.
• The process for using the stipend is too cumbersome.

A software like Compt makes managing stipends and the reimbursement process turnkey, so it can be good to evaluate any software you’re currently using (or if you’re still using human-error-prone spreadsheets, well, maybe it’s time to upgrade?). 

For the other two issues, there are ways to boost your utilization rates which we often discuss with our clients often, but always during the end-of-year stipend review.

To gauge employee awareness/interest in a particular stipend, create an employee benefits survey and include questions mentioning the one you’re considering cutting. This will help you understand how your people are feeling about the benefits you’re offering, and can give you insights into where there could be cost savings. 

If awareness is the issue…

…it all comes down to communication. Now is the perfect time to start preparing materials to promote enrollment in your stipend program so you can hit the ground running at the start of 2025.

A quick solution to increase stipend utilization and engagement in the near term is to send out a brief message via your messaging tool or email.

With Compt, you can make sure your whole team knows and can easily submit claims for their stipends through our integrations.

• If your team uses Slack, they can check their balance, submit receipts, set notifications, and share their purchases through Slack integration.
• If they use MS Teams, they can share what they buy with their stipend and give team recognition shoutouts through our Teams integration.

We also have API integrations for ADP Workforce Now, BambooHR, Rippling, Sapling (Kalidus) to automatically update your team roster, plus any SFTP integration necessary.

Outside of technology, this is where your managers can be helpful, too. Equip your people managers with information about stipends you think there may be low awareness of so they can check in with their team and remind them what’s available. For example, are there unique use cases to reimburse health and wellness stipends that they wouldn’t think of? What about food options? Your end-of-year stipend review can arm you with the right information to improve your overall benefits usage.

If interest is the issue…

…you have a few options.

• If close to zero employees are interested, it probably isn’t worth offering.
• If a decent number of your team members use it, but not enough to make it worth keeping, consolidate it into a broader stipend category (e.g., an LSA).
• If the interest is there but they’d prefer a different stipend type, look into replacing it with that.

In your employee benefits survey, ask them what they’d choose instead of that stipend and what would motivate them to use it.

Out of ideas? Check out our 2025 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmarking Report to see which categories are most popular for our customers. 

4. Retain (and consider expanding on) popular stipends.

For the stipends with high utilization rates: Nice!

Since these stipends are driving the most value for your team, they’re definitely worth keeping. And if employees are consistently spending the entire amount, or close to it, you might even want to increase the stipend amount.

Also consider how you might be able to refresh these categories for the new year.

As an example, maybe you offer a monthly wellness stipend focused on mental and physical wellbeing. If most employees are using it every month, maybe consider increasing the amount. You could also add an additional category like financial wellness to encompass even more of your employees’ overall well-being.

5. Consider consolidating stipends into fewer, broader categories.

Maybe you’re reducing your benefits budget in 2025. Or your team members all seem to want to buy different things with their stipends. Or you have too many categories, and managing them is getting difficult.

In any case, consolidation is the answer. One way to do this is to roll your lifestyle benefits into a lifestyle spending account (LSA).

If you offer stipends for mental health, family expenses, learning and development, and other categories, but only some of your team members enroll in any particular one, creating an LSA program could ease the administrative burden and maximize enrollment while maintaining satisfaction levels for your already-enrolled team members.

According to Jeffrey Hall, Founder and CEO of SavvyFi, it also gives you the flexibility to add new benefits down the line — in his example, student loan repayment (though, again, this works just as well for any other benefit as well).

“If you have an LSA in place, you have a student loan benefit in place. If you turn the category on, you don’t have to go ask anybody for additional budget. And I think that’s something to really think about if you are one of those companies that has or is thinking about an LSA.”

Note: With Compt, you can also set up “multi-group” stipends. This consolidates stipends from multiple currencies into a single stipend—an easy way to clean up your stipend page if you’re working with international employees.

6. Review stipend titles, descriptions, and policies.

This is a simple housekeeping task that will keep your stipend up to date and prevent any confusion or misuse among your team members.

• Remove or update year-specific language in the title or description.
• Go over your eligibility criteria and verify it’s still in line with your company’s goals.
• Make updates to the stipend policy (e.g., updating the list of eligible items or increasing the reimbursement amount).
• Check all the links within the description to make sure they’re still working and current.

While you’re doing this, you should also check for override amounts.

Most stipend software (including Compt) gives you the option to set a default amount, but allows managers to change it for individual team members.

The override amount takes precedence over the default, so if you have some team members with different amounts assigned, make sure they’re still accurate and justified. If overrides no longer align with your stipend policy, reset them to the default amount.

7. Incorporate new features into your program.

Just like the benefits landscape is changing, your software is evolving to support those changes. There are almost certainly new features you’re missing out on within your stipend platform. And you can use them to make your program more interactive, personalized, and streamlined.

At Compt, for example, we’ve rolled out a few features this year that make stipend programs more effective.

• Shout Outs builds off of our peer bonuses feature — you can now facilitate peer-to-peer recognition without attaching a monetary reward.
• Custom category descriptions let you turn those boring old stipend categories into an opportunity to educate employees on what they can use their stipends for.
• Customizable notifications let you control the automated Slack messages and emails the system sends your team members.
• A Professional Development module to help you manage payments for classes, certifications, tuition reimbursement, and student loan repayment in one place. Its include streamlined approval workflows, plus reporting on spend and budget.

The end of year can be an overwhelming time, but as the saying goes: ‘a little goes a long way.’ If you’re a Compt client, we’re here for you to help guide you through your end-of-year review.

If you need support on how to maximize benefits usage through an easy-to-use platform, let’s chat about how Compt can work at your organization. I wish you a successful end to the year! 

Did your end-of-year stipend review show room for improvement?

If this checklist gave you a few things to improve on, we’re here to help. Working with clients on designing stipend programs and ensuring their people are happy and aware of what’s being offered is key to my role. If you want help creating or improving your benefits program through stipends, reach out to our team to learn more!