How Collegewise ditched spreadsheets and put the “People” back in People Ops

Challenge: Managing leave in spreadsheets left Collegewise juggling high-stakes calculations, state-by-state complexities, and dwindling trust—all while feeling unsure they were even getting it right.

Solution: Automated compliance, accurate payroll, and a great user experience for employees and across HR tools gave Collegewise confidence, consistency, and time to focus on people again.

Results:

• Hundreds of hours of manual work eliminated thanks to automated payroll calculations, compliant leave guidance, and zero need for state-by-state handbook rewrites.
• Over $50,000 of benefits recovered by accessing public and private benefits, and no more awkward clawbacks.
• Compliant guidance for any employee across any state, and for full-time and variable hourly employees—including for tricky policies and scenarios that historically tripped them up.
• Two-week implementation that met an urgent real-world deadline (an employee’s upcoming parental leave) with time to spare and a seamless transition for the team.
• A dramatically improved employee experience, turning stressful leave conversations about paperwork into people-centric moments of support.
• A morale boost for the People team as they shifted from spreadsheet calculus to meaningful strategic work and employee support to improve their perception around the company.

Meet Allison Lopour, Chief People Officer at Collegewise

Originally starting with Collegewise as a counselor with just five other employees, 18 years later, Allison Lopour now leads the People team, serving almost 200 employees across the US. She jokes that her career in college counseling is itself ready to go to college. She simultaneously brings the energy and enthusiasm of a freshman, with the confidence and prowess of a professor to her work. It’s just what’s needed to lead her lean team of three to tackle any and everything that comes their way. 

"Working in college admissions is like standing on quicksand, and supporting constant change means sometimes things feel like they’re held together with toothpicks and duct tape.”

How Collegewise managed leave before Cocoon 

Spoiler alert: it’s spreadsheets.

To keep up with a growing, distributed team, and in preparation for a big employee handbook update, Allison and her People team knew they’d need to refresh their leave policy and improve how they managed the leave process. The in-house leave management process before Cocoon meant lots of spreadsheets and long, high-pressure meetings that were starting to diminish trust and morale. 

Working in these giant spreadsheets made us feel like we were chiseling the leave process out of stone… It’s frustrating to spend so much time and still end up completely unsure about what to tell your Finance team and someone about to go on leave.”

With an employee weeks away from maternity leave, Allison knew it was time for a change. And fast.

Why Collegewise chose Cocoon’s leave management solution

Allison turned to her trusted HR broker, Bennie, which pointed her to Cocoon. 

"There are a lot of HR tools out there, but the way Cocoon talks about and humanizes leave, that just feeds me as an HR person. How they translate that into everything they do, not just what they say, made me a huge fan right off the bat.”

A few deciding factors stood out:

• Ease of use: “We needed something where an employee looking at it for the first time would know exactly what to do. And no bloated enterprise software.”
• Automated multi-state compliance + accurate payroll: “I need to know that when a leave plan or payroll report comes in, it’s right when I need it, that it’s going to be right, and that I don’t have to go back and forth with anyone about it.”
• Support for variable hourly employees: “Cocoon was one of the only solutions that worked for our variable hourly employees, which we have many of.”
• Integration-friendly: “A system that goes where we go, and integrates with our current tools and possible future ones as we scale and grow.”
• Fast implementation: “Our employee was weeks away from having a baby, and I needed it live before that.”
• Demonstrable cost-savings: Executive and Finance approval was fast. “I could show money we’d save, the clawbacks we wouldn’t have to do, and the hours of time we wouldn’t be doing this in spreadsheets anymore”

The moment of truth came when the Cocoon team didn’t shy away about a fast implementation deadline right before the holidays. “Cocoon gave us an easy checklist, we did it, and two weeks later I sent the link to log into Cocoon for my employee to submit her parental leave and boom! It was done. I really wish everything worked like that!”

Putting the “people” back in People Ops: results after implementing a modern leave management system

The results after implementing Cocoon kept blowing Allison away. Her enthusiasm doesn’t just come down to features, pretty payroll files, or our zesty email newsletters—it’s ultimately because Cocoon helps her create the space to truly support people how she’s always wanted to in her career. 

1. A better employee experience

"HR processes and leave policies can get so dry, but taking leave is life-altering. To offload this administrative, legal part to Cocoon and know that it’s accurate and shows people their options, that means you can create the space to truly show up for people. The first meeting to talk about their parental leave is about them, how they’re feeling—not paperwork. Those moments are the reason you go into a career in HR.” 

2. Automated multi-state compliance saved her from writing a massive employee handbook

"Our lawyer wanted to test Cocoon with a bunch of ‘gotchas’—like a policy that always gets messed up for New York—and Cocoon handled all of them, no problem. So not only are we compliant across any number of scenarios in any given state, but also I didn’t end up having to work on a 200-page employee handbook attempting to cover all those scenarios, which would go out of date as soon as I shared it anyway.” 

3. Accurate payroll every single time

I opened the first payroll report like, ‘I’m gonna scrub this to find those two pennies in the wrong place’ but everything was perfect. And so was the next report, and the next one, and the next one. That spreadsheet stress is gone.” 

Cocoon has even helped the Collegewise team access leave benefits and funding in places where they didn’t know such programs existed to recover more than $50,000 in benefits. 

4. A more strategic and confident People team

Now Allison’s team can truly level up their careers by doing more meaningful work. 

Before it was kind of embarrassing, like ‘Hey I know I hired you to build a career and instead you're gonna do high-stakes California state leave law calculus.’ Now we can focus on problems that are still hard, but much more impactful to work through and make our team look put together.”

If you’re ready to transform your leave management process like Collegewise…

Though there are probably few customers more enthusiastic than Allison (who joked that she should tone it down because, “nobody would believe how much I love Cocoon!”), her enthusiasm is a reminder of why Cocoon exists: to make planning and managing leave clear, fair, and human for everyone in some of life’s biggest moments.

If your People team is stretched thin across spreadsheets, you’re not alone, but you don’t have to keep doing it the hard way. Give your employees a leave experience grounded in confidence rather than confusion—explore how Cocoon could work for your organization.