COMPT

Most employee perks are built on a quiet assumption: that everyone's life looks roughly the same. One gym membership. One wellness app. One mental-health subscription rolled out to a workforce that includes new parents, marathon runners, people caring for aging relatives, and remote employees three time zones away. The result is predictable. A VP of HR at a mid-sized medical center put the problem bluntly to Compt: "We reimburse for Peloton and one gym. Less than five percent of our employees are using it."

Compt was built to close that gap. The Boston company sells software that lets employers run flexible stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts - an allowance an employee can spend across dozens of categories, from home office gear to childcare, professional development to pet care. The employee picks what fits their life, submits a receipt, and is reimbursed through payroll. Compt applies the correct tax treatment automatically, tracks the spend, and gives HR visibility it never had with a spreadsheet.

The company reports that this personalization changes behavior in a measurable way. Where the industry average for lifestyle-perk participation hovers around 50 percent, Compt says its platform averages 94 percent. That is the number the company returns to most often, and it is the clearest expression of its thesis: people don't want your perk. They want their choice.

The founder who had to clean up the mess

Compt was founded in 2018 by Amy Spurling, who came to the problem from an unusual direction. Before starting the company she had been a three-time CFO and two-time COO, and by her own account helped raise more than $200 million across prior venture-backed companies. She was named Boston Business Journal's "CFO of the Year" in 2016. That background matters, because the hardest part of employee stipends is not the perk - it is the tax code.

Every dollar an employer hands an employee has a tax character: some stipends are taxable, some are not, and the rules are specific. Get it wrong at scale and you have a compliance problem. Compt's reimbursement engine decides taxable versus non-taxable treatment per IRS guidance and pushes the result through payroll, which is the sort of unglamorous plumbing a former finance chief would think to build first.

A deliberately boring design choice

Compt made one decision that separates it from much of the field: no prepaid cards, no stored-value wallets. The platform is reimbursement-based. Employees front the cost of an eligible expense and are repaid through payroll, which means there is no prefunding, no minimum spend, and no float sitting on plastic. It is less flashy than a branded debit card. It is also far easier to keep compliant and lets employees spend anywhere - Compt reports reaching 64,000-plus vendors across 75-plus countries without operating a marketplace of its own.

For the HR teams that actually run these programs, the pitch is time. One benefits leader at a 250-person health center described the spreadsheet era to Compt this way: "People keep asking me - have they gotten paid yet? That eats so much of my time." Compt's answer is a system where the average administrator spends roughly 30 minutes a month on the program, and where 93 percent of users say the stipend makes them feel appreciated. The product it is really selling is the hours HR gets back, and the anxiety it removes.