For HR leaders at companies where every decision runs through you
Sentinel runs the compliance workflow for you so there is no missed deadline to be named for. The system is the expert, not you.
When a plaintiff's attorney files an FMLA complaint, they name the company and every individual who touched the decision. Your insurance may cover the company. It often does not cover you.
Haybarger v. Lawrence County Adult Probation, 667 F.3d 408 (3d Cir. 2012). The Third Circuit held that an individual supervisor can be held personally liable as an employer under FMLA.
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Personal Liability Exposure
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Who this is for
If your HRIS gives you a place to enter FMLA dates and leaves the compliance work to you, every case is a private exposure you carry personally. Sentinel moves the expertise into the system so the file is built before anyone asks for it.
Before Sentinel
After Sentinel
The HR manager who gets the DOL letter is not someone who stopped caring. She is someone who managed FMLA the way she was taught — in the system she was given, with the process she inherited — and never had a reason to believe anything was wrong.
Until the letter.
What the letter says, in legal language, is this: your FMLA clock started on the wrong date. The entitlement calculation for your shift workers used the wrong method. The incomplete certification in case 4 did not receive a written cure notice within 7 days. The employee terminated 60 days after returning from leave is presumed to have been retaliated against.
None of those errors are obvious from the inside. They do not announce themselves. They accumulate quietly across every case, every year, until a single employee retains an attorney and the pattern becomes evidence.
Automatic double damages. All attorney fees paid by you. A 90-day window where any termination near FMLA activity is presumed retaliatory until you prove otherwise. These are not worst-case scenarios. They are the statutory defaults once a violation is established.
One case, fully litigated, costs between $100,000 and $1.3 million. The violations that cause it cost nothing to fix. The window to fix them closes the day the complaint is filed.
“HR is asleep at the wheel.”
Employment attorney, after reviewing a manufacturing client's FMLA case files
Every HRIS on the market gives you a place to record FMLA dates. None of them run the compliance workflow. None of them tell you what to do next, generate the correct forms, fire the cure notice, or maintain the audit trail that would defend you in court.
The system knows FMLA law. You follow the steps.
When an employee reports a qualifying event:
When the case closes, the audit trail is ready. Every action documented. Every form generated. Every deadline met or escalated. Every conversation logged with a timestamp.
You do not need to become an FMLA expert. The system is the expert.
The free audit checks six areas
90 seconds. No email required. Results are immediate.
Debra Haybarger was the office manager for the Lawrence County Adult Probation and Parole agency. She had Type II diabetes, heart disease, and kidney problems. She missed work for medical appointments. Her supervisor wrote it up in her performance reviews. She was eventually terminated.
She sued under FMLA. She named her employer. She also named her supervisor, William Mancino, personally.
On January 31, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that an individual supervisor with sufficient control over an employee's employment can be held personally liable as an employer under the FMLA. The court found no distinction between supervisors at public agencies and supervisors at private companies. Every circuit that has addressed the question since has reached the same conclusion.
Haybarger v. Lawrence County Adult Probation and Parole, 667 F.3d 408 (3d Cir. 2012).
What the holding means for you
This has happened before. It will happen again. Most HR managers will not hear about the Third Circuit holding until the complaint arrives with their name on it. Sentinel is the layer between you and that complaint.
The complaint does not wait for you to notice.
Find out whether your current process would survive a personal liability claim before one lands.
Check my process now — free →The audit is free and takes 90 seconds. If your report shows gaps, and most do, every Sentinel account includes the following. No feature gates. No bonus tiers. Everything ships in the base product.
Step-by-step workflow for every case. WH-380 and WH-381 generated with correct dates pre-filled. 15-day certification window, 7-day cure window, and the 5-day employer response clock tracked on a live countdown. Rolling backward entitlement calculation built in. Complete timestamped audit trail from open to close.
Every open case gets reviewed for the exposure points that typically get HR sued. Each flag comes with a CFR citation and a recommended next step. You see what a plaintiff's attorney would see, before they see it.
Proactive reminders fire before the deadlines HR managers actually miss. Designation notice timing, recertification windows, the 30-day return check, the 79-day exhaustion alert. The system thinks ahead of you.
Case-aware email drafts for every tickler step. Employee name, dates, and leave type pull from the case automatically. Every draft includes the relevant 29 CFR 825 citation. Tone and disclaimer configured per company. Every draft adapts to your team's voice and handbook language.
The full text of 29 CFR Part 825 indexed and searchable inside the dashboard. Every AI draft, risk flag, and case step links back to the controlling citation. The source of truth sits inside the product, not on another tab.
Cross-case document storage for medical certifications, fitness-for-duty forms, accommodation letters, and WH forms. DocuSign integration writes an audit row before the envelope is sent and updates lifecycle state on every webhook event. Your chain of custody is complete.
Day 0 and Day 1 operational items fire automatically the moment a case opens. Benefits premium balloon deduction setup, equipment chain of custody, active-leave flag on the employee list, personal liability alert on every open file. The operational work that usually gets dropped is pre-populated.
You and Jacob on a 30-minute call. By the end, your first active FMLA case is in the system, your deadlines are populated, and your alerts are live. Direct access to the founder for the life of the account.
If you miss an FMLA deadline that Sentinel tracked and sent you an alert for, we will refund your last two months. No questions asked.
This guarantee exists because the failure mode is specific and preventable. If the system tracks the deadline and fires the alert and you act on it, the violation cannot happen. If the system fails to alert you on a case it was tracking, that is our fault and we cover you.
This is not a satisfaction guarantee. It is a performance guarantee. We are guaranteeing the outcome.
Sentinel starts with FMLA — the compliance problem with the highest liability exposure and the clearest automation path. As your obligations expand, every module is built into the same system, the same audit trail, the same step-by-step engine.
Case workflows, deadline tracking, rolling backward calculation, WH form generation
Interactive process, reasonable accommodation tracking, documentation
Qualifying event notification, election periods, coverage tracking
Job classification, demographic data collection, reporting automation
Overtime calculations, exemption analysis, wage audit trail
Document verification, work history, compliance checklists
Incident tracking, 300 log management, posting requirements
Course enrollment, expiration tracking, renewal alerts
Claim intake, managed care coordination, return-to-work
Exit process, final pay, benefits termination, documentation
FMLA is the entry point. Get that right first. When your compliance footprint expands, Sentinel grows with it. Same system. Same audit trail. Same step-by-step guidance. You do not start over.
Why this exists
My mom runs HR at a 200-person semiconductor manufacturer. I watched her team do FMLA in Excel. The person running the cases was missing steps. Not because she was bad at her job, but because the process has dozens of steps with specific deadlines and there is no system that tells you what to do next.
Then I learned the cost of getting it wrong: one missed step, fully litigated, costs between $100,000 and $1.3 million. Automatic double damages. Attorney fees. A 90-day presumption of guilt. All because someone missed a 7-day cure notice or started the clock on the wrong date.
I looked for the software that should exist. A step-by-step engine that runs the compliance workflow, not just tracks dates. It did not exist. The enterprise tools assume you already know FMLA. The HRIS systems give you a place to enter data and leave the compliance work to you.
FMLA compliance is a software problem. Nobody had built the software. So I built it.
Jacob Panagopoulos, Founder
Per employee per month. No feature gates. Every account gets the full product.
Half the standard rate, locked for the life of the account. Only the first 10 customers get this. Every feature listed above is included. Direct access to Jacob for onboarding and the first 90 days. When the tenth seat is taken, the rate closes permanently and Founding Partners keep $4.50 regardless of where standard pricing lands.
A 50-employee company runs $225 a month. A 100-employee company runs $450. A 250-employee company runs $1,125.
Claim a Founding Partner seatThe rate every customer after the tenth seat pays. Same product. Same guarantee. Same direct line to the founder. Priced in line with AbsenceSoft and the other enterprise leave platforms, without the six-month implementation and the enterprise contract minimum.
Book a call →Multi-entity, multi-state workforces above 500 employees. Custom integrations, dedicated implementation, and legal liaison coordination. Priced on a custom contract, not per employee.
Contact us →Six questions, 90 seconds, personalized risk report. Find out exactly which DOL requirements your current process fails and your estimated exposure per case. No email, no account.
Start the free audit →Founding Partners lock $4.50 per employee per month for the life of the account. That is half the standard rate. It does not reset on renewal. It does not adjust when standard pricing moves. Founding Partners keep $4.50 forever, regardless of where Sentinel goes from here.
Only the first 10 customers qualify. Every Founding Partner gets a personal onboarding call with Jacob and a direct line to him through the first 90 days. The cap is not a sales tactic. It is an operational constraint. Onboarding at quality takes time.
When the tenth seat is taken, Founding Partner pricing closes. It is not coming back after it is gone.
It is built specifically for companies your size. The difference between Sentinel and every other option on the market comes down to this:
AbsenceSoft, Sparrow, and Tilt are leave management platforms built for enterprise HR departments. They assume you already know FMLA. They give you a place to enter data and leave the compliance work to you. Rippling gives you everything and specializes in nothing. None of them run the compliance workflow. None of them tell you what to do next.
Sentinel does one thing: FMLA compliance for manufacturing HR managers who do not have an FMLA specialist on staff. Step-by-step workflow. Correct forms generated automatically. Every deadline tracked. Every action logged to an audit trail. You follow the steps. The system handles the law.
For an 80-employee company, that is $360 a month on Founding Partner pricing or $720 a month on standard pricing for a system that is 10x faster to DOL audit-ready than doing it manually and eliminates the $3,000 to $5,000 per month cost of outsourcing FMLA case management to a consultant.
The DOL fine structure does not adjust for company size. A violation at an 80-person company carries the same automatic double damages and attorney fees as a violation at an 8,000-person company. The difference is that the 80-person company has no legal budget to absorb it.
The question is not whether your process works day to day. The question is whether it would hold up in a DOL audit.
Specifically: does your clock start at manager notification, not HR receipt? Does your entitlement calculation for shift workers use the rolling backward 12-month method required by FMLA2025-02-A? Do incomplete certifications receive a written cure notice within exactly 7 calendar days? Does your audit trail document every action in a format a court would accept?
If the answer to any of those is “I'm not sure,” take the free audit. It will tell you in 90 seconds.
Your HRIS records dates. It does not run the compliance workflow.
ADP, Rippling, Paylocity — every one of them gives you a field to enter an FMLA start date. None of them tell you what that date triggers. None of them generate the WH-380 with the correct return-by date pre-filled. None of them fire the 7-day cure notice when a certification comes back incomplete. None of them maintain the timestamped, action-level audit trail that satisfies DOL evidentiary standards.
Your HRIS is the record system. Sentinel is the compliance system. They are not the same thing, and your HRIS cannot replace the other.
Those tools are built for large HR departments at enterprise companies. They are full leave management platforms with implementation teams, contract minimums, and feature sets designed for companies with dedicated leave specialists.
Sentinel is built for the HR manager at a 50 to 300 employee manufacturer who is doing FMLA alongside recruiting, onboarding, benefits, and everything else. It does one thing: makes sure your FMLA process is compliant and documented. No 6-month implementation. No enterprise contract. Set up in a day, running in a week.
If you miss a tracked, alerted deadline in your first 60 days, you get a full refund. No questions asked.
This guarantee is real. If the system alerts you and a deadline still slips — whether due to a system failure or a workflow gap we did not account for — you should not pay for it. We are confident enough in the product to put that in writing.
Rippling integration is on the roadmap. Today, employee data is entered directly into Sentinel and most teams complete the initial setup in under an hour.
If your HRIS is critical to your decision, mention it on the demo call and we will tell you exactly where the integration stands.
Jacob Panagopoulos, who built Sentinel. Not a sales rep, not an account executive. The call is 20-30 minutes. The goal is to understand your specific situation and show you whether Sentinel addresses it. If it does not fit, you will leave with a specific action plan you can run on your own.
The FMLA audit is free and takes 90 seconds. It gives you a specific risk report showing the gaps in your current process and your estimated exposure per case. No email required.
For the full product, we do a live walkthrough on the demo call rather than an unguided trial. Manufacturing HR managers are busy — a 20-minute guided walkthrough is more useful than a trial account you do not have time to explore.
Still have questions?
Book a callSix questions. 90 seconds. Your risk score, your specific gaps, and your estimated exposure per case. Free. No email required.
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