High Engagement, Low Overhead: How Jellyvision Modernized Flexible Benefits With Compt

Meet: Stephanie French, Sr. Benefits & Compensation Manager at Jellyvision

Jellyvision is a Chicago-based technology company best known for ALEX^®, its award-winning interactive benefits software used by millions of employees nationwide. With 200+ full-time employees distributed across more than 15 states, the team operates using a flexible remote-work model.

As Sr. Benefits & Compensation Manager, Stephanie French oversees every part of the company’s broad benefits ecosystem, including health, dental, and vision coverage, HSAs/FSAs, commuter accounts, life and disability insurance, surrogacy and adoption support, gender-affirming care, leave and time off, and perks and fringe benefits. She also plays a key role in ensuring that Jellyvision’s benefits keep pace with the varied needs of its diverse, distributed workforce.

“My world involves all things benefits,” she explains. “I support employees day to day, and I’m also looking at budget, managing spend, where utilization sits, and whether we’re meeting the holistic needs of our organization.”

When Jellyvision first transitioned to remote work in 2020, during the pandemic, Stephanie found herself at the center of a rapidly evolving benefits landscape — and she seized the opportunity to rethink how the company supported every employee across the country.

Challenge: Managing benefits for a newly remote workforce with spreadsheets

With the people who power Jellyvision distributed all across the country, the limitations of the organization’s stipend process became impossible to ignore. The company offered solid benefits, but each one relied on a patchwork of manual steps that created extra work for both employees and HR.

One stipend program, for example, lived inside a complex Excel file that Stephanie rebuilt each year. Every reimbursement required her to review documents, store them for audit purposes, update formulas, troubleshoot errors, and prepare clean reports for payroll. And when submissions surged near year-end, the workload often ballooned into two to three full days of processing.

“It worked — it did the thing it needed to — but it just wasn’t as clean or as helpful as it could have been,” Stephanie says. “The formulas broke constantly.”

As the team added stipends, the fragmentation only grew. Each program had different rules and various documentation requirements, and Jellyvision lacked a centralized hub to guide employees.

It became clear to Stephanie that she needed a more modern, unified way to manage stipends, for her own sake and for the benefit of everyone at Jellyvision. 

What’s next: Discovering Compt

With multiple stipends in place and a distributed team consistently using and relying on them, Stephanie knew the next step was finding a platform that could keep pace with Jellyvision’s evolving needs. She wanted something employees would actually use, leaders could understand, and HR could manage without sacrificing days of work each quarter.

She explored a few potential platforms, including Forma, but quickly realized that most tools were either too rigid, too complex, or too expensive for what Jellyvision needed. Compt stood out immediately.

The fit wasn’t just about features. From the start, the Compt team demonstrated a willingness to listen, iterate, and refine, which felt rare in the benefits-tech space. After a short evaluation, Jellyvision began its Compt implementation and was fully live in just 15-17 days, with no disruption to employees or payroll cycles.

For Stephanie, this marked a clear turning point: the end of spreadsheets and year-end overwhelm, and the beginning of a more scalable, employee-first way to manage Jellyvision’s stipend program. 

Solution: A centralized Compt platform that simplifies every stipend

Once Jellyvision moved its stipend programs into Compt’s flexible benefits platform, the administrative lift that once consumed days each year became dramatically easier to manage. Instead of juggling multiple spreadsheets and documentation folders, Stephanie gained a single centralized dashboard where every stipend is tracked, reviewed, and reimbursed. It gave her full visibility without the extra tabs and manual recordkeeping.

Compt also gave the team the flexibility to customize each stipend (i.e., wellness and a specific therapy allowance, home-office support, a family concierge benefit) to employee needs. Jellyvision added clear descriptions, eligibility rules, and custom prompts to reduce resubmissions, and employees quickly began using the platform without extra guidance or training. 

“There are new hires who join Jellyvision and … it’s intuitive enough that I don’t need to have a separate demo call scheduled,” Stephanie explains.

Further, Compt’s admin features changed how Stephanie approached benefits management. Multidocument uploads, single-screen review, and one-click approval replaced her maze of tabs, downloads, and manually maintained records.

Results: Impact in action

Time saved

Moving Jellyvision’s stipends into Compt eliminated the spreadsheet rebuilds and year-end backlog that once consumed days of work. Stephanie now manages stipends in a single quarterly session, a meaningful shift for someone who describes herself as “a party of one” when it comes to benefits administration.

High engagement

Nearly 90% of full-time employees use their stipends, supported by clear categories and an intuitive submission flow. Stephanie uses Compt’s data to identify trends and help managers encourage employees to take advantage of the benefits available to them. Quarterly cycles also drive consistent usage throughout the year instead of a last-minute surge. “People are happy with Compt,” she notes — simple feedback that means a lot.

Smooth adoption

Employees quickly embraced the new system. Because it’s so simple and straightforward, new hires rarely need help getting started. As Stephanie explains, “The way the system is structured drives intuitive utilization by the employees,” making stipends easy to use from day one, even for a team spread across more than 15 states.

Reliable partnership

Compt’s responsiveness has improved Jellyvision’s HR operations, and several platform features were developed directly from Stephanie’s feedback. “With the change, that’s completely gone out the window,” she says, reflecting on how early frustrations around multidocument uploads were resolved through collaborative, iterative updates.