Pointlogic and Pré Wonen.
Realtime insight in the choice budget.
At Pré Wonen, employees manage their individual choice budget, in Pointlogic’s Flex Benefits tool. They go through a series of questions and help themselves. “You can see in real time how much money you have left and arrange when to have something paid out,” says Annemiek Spoor, HR advisor at this South-Kennemerland housing corporation. “That saves HR a lot of time and research.” Flex Benefits is not only more efficient, but also more reliable than the old way of working, in which HR kept track of choice budgets manually.
“In January we put the elective budget ready for the employee. At Pré Wonen we call this Pré Flex. It contains the vacation pay, which we do not pay out in May but at a time of your choice. It also includes the gross and net ratification – that amount is the same for everyone, by the way – and €100 welfare budget. You can deduct the union contribution in a tax-friendly way and you can buy additional vacation hours. The intention is that soon our bicycle plan will also be included.
“HR was understaffed and overloaded. The team had its hands full with the reward system, which was maintained in Excel. It was a lot of manual work and therefore prone to error.”
The hands full.
HR was understaffed and overstretched when Spoor joined Pré Wonen in June 2022. The team had its hands full with the reward system, which was maintained in Excel. “Every employee would call about the elective budget. So we were always finding out everything for everyone and checking whether it was all still correct. And if something changed, for example if people started working more or less, separate calculations were needed. It was a lot of manual work and therefore also error-prone.”
An external HR project manager explored options for digitizing the choice budget in 2022. Pré Wonen was already working with Cobra, SD Worx’s personnel and payroll software. Flex Benefits from Pointlogic was therefore a logical choice. “We did inquire whether it also communicates with other systems, should we make other choices in the future. And it does.” After that, things moved quickly, says Spoor. “Pointlogic built a system for us in the fall and in January 2023 we were able to get the Pré Flex budget ready for employees.”
A solution that works.
“With Pointlogic you can really spar, if you run into something. You wonder if something can be fixed at all, but nine times out of ten the consultants come back with a solution that works.”
Ease of use needs special attention at Pré Wonen. Spoor: “We find it important that everyone can get along with the system, that everyone understands it. Before we went live, we therefore invited a few people to try out the system.” Based on their feedback, Pointlogic created a customized dashboard. That takes the employee by the hand. “Every request has to fit within the amounts and within the rules. If someone enters too high an amount, a red ‘thumbs down’ immediately appears on the screen. It’s very user-friendly. Pointlogic has done a lot of work on this.”
Annemiek Spoor, HR Advisor
“With Pointlogic you can really spar, if you run into something. You wonder if something can be done at all, but nine times out of ten the consultants come back with a solution that works.”
Always open.
For optimal ease of use, Pré Wonen chose the “always open” setting, which allows employees to make flexible choices throughout the year. The system extracts data from payroll at set times, but employees can make their requests on any day of the month. Even during the processing period, between the data dump on the first of the month and the payout on the fourteenth. “For example, an employee who thinks on the fifth of the month, ‘I’ll fix it, because now I’m thinking about it,’ won’t be told afterwards that he can’t access his money at that time. An extra data dump on the fifteenth ensures that requests from that period go along to the next round.”
Happy.
Flex Benefits signals anomalous situations in a timely manner. If someone is going to work more or less, or if an employee is about to leave, the system automatically adjusts the budgets and communicates this in an understandable and friendly way. Spoor: “Everyone was really happy with this immediately! Employees no longer have to e-mail us. And HR no longer has to look anything up or check anything. Everyone sees their budget in real time and knows when they have been paid out. Paying back or paying out too much is a thing of the past.”