Today, providing a competitive benefits package is key to employee satisfaction and retention. However, understanding benefits has become more challenging with health care constantly in flux, new benefits accounts, and all the acronyms to keep straight. This means that employers and benefits brokers have the added task of educating people to better understand and appreciate the value of tax-advantaged accounts like HSAs, HRAs, Health Care FSAs, Dependent Care FSAs, and commuter benefits.

A simple way to accomplish this is by offering a benefits app. What does a benefits app do? In short, it makes life a little easier for people managing their benefits accounts, allowing them to check their balance, pay providers, and reimburse themselves for out-of-pocket spending with just a few clicks. Based on experience with our own myCYC^® mobile benefits app, these are some of the key advantages of offering a benefits app to your employees or clients.

With a benefits app, employees can track how much they are spending on what products and services to better manage their health care expense budget. Using the app, they can see a full history of when they visited which provider to stay on top of their bills and appointment scheduling. It’s easy to forget to schedule an annual physical or that it’s been six months since the last trip to the dentist. A benefits app maintains a log of visits to health care providers, helping users to manage their health and budget simultaneously. Also, when people are making contribution elections for the new plan year, they can review their spending history through the benefits app to know how to adjust and budget for health care costs to make smarter decisions for themselves and their families.

Healthier employees are happier employees, and happier employees will stay at your company longer and be more productive—and all of this can be facilitated with something as simple as a benefits app!

While you can tell people the benefits of tax-advantaged accounts until you are blue in the face, when it comes to proving the value of anything, seeing is believing. Offering a benefits app allows employees to see their tax-advantaged dollars at work in real time, and the streamlined process of spending, checking their contribution amount, and reimbursing themselves is only more powerful proof that these accounts are designed to give them control over their health care, dependent care, and transportation-related spending.

Based on consumer reviews of various benefits apps, people who use an app for HSA, FSA, and HRA reimbursements find that it makes the savings they realize by using their tax-free funds more tangible, therefore enhancing their satisfaction. Many people make plan elections during open enrollment in fall, and by spring forget what accounts they chose! That can lead to a sense of dissatisfaction, especially if individuals come to the end of a plan year with more money left than they can spend in a potential use-it-or-lose-it situation commonly associated with an FSA. An app can help people remember and better utilize these tax-free dollars for health care costs, which remain one of the highest expenses, accounting for 8.2% of annual expenditure in the average household, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

By managing their own claims, reimbursements, and contributions with a benefits app, employees can become self-sufficient and really see the value of consumer-driven health care accounts. They can upload receipts and documentation for claims, pay providers, and issue reimbursements through an automated system that puts them in the driver’s seat and reduces the amount of paperwork, administrative tasks, and time spent on guidance for HR professionals who might otherwise have to help employees with these processes manually.

The boom in apps has coincided with the increase in the amount of time smartphone users spend on their phones. Interestingly enough, almost 90% of that time is spent in apps, as opposed to mobile web browsing.

To compete today, it seems you need to have an app for your product or company. The same goes for employer benefits! On average, smartphone users in the U.S. spend more than two hours and 15 minutes per day using apps, according to App Annie Intelligence’s annual report Spotlight on Consumer App Usage.

People are already accustomed to managing their lives through apps, and by offering a benefits app, it will only make it easier for them to keep track of their spending and contributions. Making any aspect of life simpler and more convenient for employees will go a long way to increasing their overall satisfaction at your organization!