Benefits that are utilised

By Redaktion techport.ai, HR-Beratung · Last updated on 21 August 2026

The company pays for fruit baskets, gym memberships, cycle-to-work schemes, occupational pensions, childcare subsidies, and travel cost allowances. Controlling knows the total costs. No one knows the utilisation. In surveys, 40 per cent of the workforce say the company offers too few additional benefits. Most of them do not know what is available, and some cannot use it because the application is a paper form lying in payroll.

Benefits only foster loyalty if they are known, accessible, and suitable. Everything else is a cost with a clear conscience.

How to tell

There is no answer to the question of what percentage of the workforce uses which offer.
The offers originate from different years and occasions. No one has ever considered them as a package.
Applications, changes, and billing are handled manually. Each benefit has its own process.
The workforce has changed, but the offering has not. A cycle-to-work scheme is less appealing to shift workers than predictable working hours.

Why this happens

Benefits are introduced when someone has a good idea or a provider is persuasive. They are rarely abolished because that causes unrest. And they are not measured because the data is in payroll, with the provider, and in paper folders, never in one place.

Our approach

Record existing benefits and utilisation. We list all offers with costs, utilisation rates, administrative effort, and tax treatment. We retrieve utilisation data from payroll and provider portals.
Assess demand. A brief survey, evaluated by groups: age, location, working model. The needs of a 28-year-old developer and a 55-year-old shift supervisor differ, and the offering should reflect that.
Decide on portfolio. Offers with low utilisation and high effort are removed or replaced. Where sensible, a budget is created from which employees can choose, instead of a list that applies to everyone.
Digitise administration. Applications, changes, proof, and billing are handled via the HR system or a benefits portal with an interface to payroll. Utilisation thus becomes automatically measurable.

What you gain from it

The benefits budget fosters loyalty instead of administrative overhead.
Employees know and utilise what is available, and this is reflected in the next survey.
Tax advantages are maximised because payroll knows the rules.

From our projects

When we evaluate benefits portfolios, the utilisation of individual offers is often below ten per cent, and the reasons are always the same: unknown, unsuitable for the workforce structure, or too cumbersome to apply for. A survey of needs per group usually yields a different portfolio than the existing one. We find tax errors in billing more frequently than companies expect, especially with non-cash benefits and subsidies.

Good to know

Many benefits rely on tax-free allowances and lump-sum taxation, such as the monthly non-cash benefit allowance of 50 euros, childcare subsidies, job tickets or salary sacrifice schemes for occupational pension provision. The rules change regularly. A benefit that is incorrectly accounted for will cost more than it delivered during the next payroll tax audit. For this reason, the benefit portfolio and payroll accounting should be integrated into a single system.

Frequently asked questions

Are flexible benefit budgets not too complex?

Not with a portal. The complexity arises from manual administration, and this is often higher with a fixed list than with a digitally managed budget.

What to do with benefits that nobody uses but everyone knows about?

Communicate honestly and replace them. The survey provides the argument. An offering that is replaced by a more suitable one causes less unrest than one that quietly disappears.

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