Somewhere in your company, an employee who started three weeks ago still can’t fill a prescription — the system says they don’t exist yet.
On paper, your HRIS and your insurer are connected. In practice, the handoff is where things quietly break. Orchard is the advisor who fixes it.
Every Canadian HR lead has seen some version of this:
A new hire enrolls on day one and waits 2–6 weeks for their benefits card — meaning they’re paying out of pocket or going without.
An employee submits a claim during the gap, and it’s denied because the carrier doesn’t have them on file yet.
An employee goes on leave with stale salary data, and their disability coverage gets miscalculated at exactly the moment they need it most.
A termination doesn’t propagate to the carrier for months, and the company keeps paying premiums on someone who left in February.
A dependent update gets entered in the HRIS, but never makes it to the insurer — and the family finds out at the pharmacy counter.
And they happen to companies that did everything right — picked a good platform, hired a good HR lead, signed with a reputable carrier.
The limbo period is the part of the system no one warns you about. It’s also the part Orchard exists to fix.
Every HRIS vendor in Canada will tell you their platform connects with the major insurers. Technically, they’re not wrong. There’s an API, or a file feed, or a partnership logo on a slide somewhere.
The HRIS does its job. The insurer does its job. The space between them is owned by no one.
The HRIS layer is where employee data lives. That makes it the natural choke point for moving accounts — and increasingly, the platforms are using it that way. We think you should know that going in.
Most advisors stop at “we’ll help you pick a platform.” We start where they stop — at the data layer between your HRIS and your carrier.
We document every field, every trigger, every place a human has to retype something, and we engineer it out.
Most advisors are reactive, fixing the integration only after a claim is denied or an employee complains. We pressure-test your data flow against the failure modes we’ve seen across hundreds of Canadian plans, and we flag the exposures before they surface: stale beneficiary data, coverage mismatches, gaps during leaves, contractor-vs-employee misclassifications in the feed
Beyond the integration itself, Orchard clients get access to our own forward-looking risk profiling — a proprietary tool, built in-house, that models where your plan is heading three to five years out based on your demographics and claims trends, ranked by claim impact and likelihood. Sample reports available on request.
HRIS implementations are usually one-and-done. The advisor leaves, the integration drifts, and within 18 months you’re back where you started. Orchard treats the HRIS-to-carrier connection as a living system — monitored, audited quarterly, and updated as your headcount, plan design, and carrier processes change.
We’re platform-agnostic on purpose. Orchard doesn’t run an in-house brokerage inside any HRIS. We don’t take referral fees from platform partners. When the platform underneath you changes — and it will — Orchard stays the constant.
When Collage reintroduced its advisor portal and access stopped being automatic, we didn’t wait for clients to notice. We built a reconnection playbook and walked teams through it.
Collage recently reintroduced its advisor portal after removing it a couple of years ago. Advisor access is no longer automatically maintained, which means Orchard may need to be reconnected at the account level to keep supporting your team inside the platform.
Download this step-by-step guide to get reconnected. Reconnection takes about two minutes.
Four steps. No drawn-out discovery phase, no deliverables that sit in a drawer.
We trace every data point that should be moving between your HRIS and your carrier, and we show you where it’s actually going.
You get a written assessment of where your plan is exposed today and where it’s heading over the next three to five years, ranked by claim impact and likelihood.
We work directly with your HRIS provider and carrier — not as a translator, but as the accountable party — to engineer a feed that holds.
Quarterly reviews, anomaly alerts, and a single point of contact when something changes on either side.
We work across the major Canadian HRIS platforms — ADP, Ceridian (Dayforce), UKG, BambooHR, Rise, Folks, Workday, and Collage — and with every major Canadian carrier. The platform matters less than the connection.
A 20-minute conversation tells us whether your HRIS and your carrier are actually talking, or just nodding at each other across the room.
