Every census is validated at the sponsor’s desk, in their browser, before it is ever sent. Errors get caught and corrected by the person who can actually answer for them — so the file that lands in your queue is already clean. No correction cycle burning the weeks between submission and the filing deadline.
Runs entirely in the sponsor’s browser · participant data is never uploaded
Both parties are being reasonable, and that’s what makes this so hard to fix with a phone call. The sponsor genuinely believes they delivered on time. You genuinely cannot start until the file is usable. Neither of you can see the other’s calendar.
“We sent the census on June 12. The filing isn’t due until July 31. That’s seven weeks — what’s the holdup?”
Their file is one of hundreds arriving in the same three weeks — and most of them need work before work can begin.
No administrator bills for it and no client sees it. A file arrives, someone opens it, something is off — a stripped SSN, a hire date in the wrong format, compensation in a column that doesn’t match last year. Now it’s an email, a wait, a second file, a second review. One plan, an hour or two of skilled time, gone. It reads as the cost of doing business right up until you multiply it by your whole book.
These are your assumptions, not our statistics — set them to what you actually see and watch what falls out.
in staff time spent making client censuses usable — before a single compliance test is run.
Arithmetic only: plans × correction rate × hours × rate. Client touches assume two contacts per corrected file — the request and the follow-up — which most administrators will recognize as generous.
The hours are the visible cost. The expensive part is what the hours do to the relationship — on both sides of it.
Because the correction cycle is invisible from their desk, the only explanation available is that your firm is slow. That impression doesn’t stay private — it shapes the renewal conversation, the advisor’s opinion, and whether your name comes up when someone asks for a referral. A client who caused the delay can still be the one who leaves over it.
Chasing files is the least satisfying work in plan administration: no judgment, no expertise, just the same email to a different client, four hundred times a season. It is disproportionately what burns out experienced administrators — and every one you lose takes plan knowledge with them that took years to build.
The same plans send the same errors twelve months later, and the goodwill spent explaining last season’s delay doesn’t come back. The status quo isn’t a bad year — it is a structural annual cost, and it grows with every plan you add to the book.
Your team can spot an error. Only the sponsor can resolve it — they hold the payroll, the hire dates, the pay history. So the check belongs there, at the moment of submission, not three weeks later in your queue. Do that, and the round trips don’t get faster — they stop happening.
A birth date that moved by two years is perfectly valid on its own. Put it beside the prior census and it’s obviously wrong — and it has quietly changed that participant’s catch-up eligibility.
Nothing is sampled and nothing is assumed. Every rule re-runs after every change, so a fix that breaks something else surfaces immediately instead of at filing time.
CensusCheck is issued by an administrator to their own sponsors — it never sits between you and your client. Every deployment is a private instance in your colors, on your domain, with your team as the only point of contact.