Setting Up Flexible Credits

This chapter provides an overview of flexible credits and discusses how to:

Define flexible credit earnings.
Set up excess credit calculations.

Understanding Flexible Credits

Many organizations offer their employees credits that they can apply towards their benefits. PeopleSoft Enterprise Benefits Administration enables you to define three types of flexible credits:

General credits that apply when an employee is enrolled in a benefit program.
Plan-based credits that apply when an employee enrolls in a specific benefit plan type.
Option-based credits that apply when an employee enrolls in a specific benefit option.

After you have defined the flexible credit earnings, use the Benefit Program table to link the credit to the benefit program, benefit plan type, or benefit option.

The Benefits Administration process sums all credits for an employee and passes the totals by earnings code to payroll. The total credits are treated as additional earnings for employees.

Defining Flexible Credit Earnings

This section discusses how to:

Set up flexible credits.
Set up credit amounts.

Prerequisites

This section discusses Benefits Administration activation.

To activate Benefits Administration:

Access the Installation Table - Products page by navigating to Set Up HRMS, Install, Installation Table.
Select the Benefits Administration check box.

The fields that you use to define flexible credits and automated enrollment processing will become available on the Benefit Program table. In addition, all new benefit programs that you create after Benefits Administration is selected will be identified with a program type of Automated on the Benefit Program page of the Benefit Program table.
Select the Product Specific tab.
Enter the start date for Benefits Administration to set the “look-back” window for your benefits processing.

The start date is used for event maintenance and serves several purposes:

Start Date for	Purpose
Event qualification	The system will flag only changes to job data, birthdate, service date, state, postal code, and union code if the job record that is being inserted, corrected, or deleted has an effective date greater than or equal to the Benefits Administration start date. The system will also not trigger event flags for passive events that occur before the start date.
Event maintenance scheduling	When scheduling event maintenance, Benefits Administration will review only event records with an effective date greater than or equal to the Benefits Administration start date. This review includes potentially flagging these event records for your review and determining the proper events to leave open for processing (BAS_PARTIC. EVENT_STATUS = ‘O’).
Pay calendar access	For event maintenance, while setting coverage and deduction begin dates, Benefits Administration will load pay calendar data starting with pay period end dates greater than or equal to the Benefits Administration start date.

Setting Up Flexible Credits

To set up flexible credits:

Establish the credit amount using the benefit rate table.
Set up the calculation rules for the credit.
Identify the earnings code that will define the credit in the earnings program.

Warning! If earnings codes for each plan type are not unique, flexible credits might not start and end correctly during open enrollment and event maintenance processing. For example, five medical benefit plans in a benefit program can use the same earnings code. However, dental, life, and general credits need their own earnings codes.

Note. (USF) Flexible credits are not generally used in the U.S. federal government.

Setting Up Credit Amounts

When defining a general credit using the benefit rate table, the Rate Per Unit field value must be None. Only the employee portion is picked up and reflected as the credit amount. Option based credits may have a rate per unit.

Note. If you have defined the credit amount based on age or salary percentage, you need to set up a calculation rule to define how the system determines age and benefit base salary amount.

Setting Up Excess Credit Calculations

To set up excess credit calculations, use the Excess Credit Calculation (EXCESS_CRDT_CALC) component.

This section provides an overview of excess credit calculation setup and discusses how to enter excess credit calculations.

Understanding Excess Credit Calculation Setup

During the calculation of benefits costs and credits, Benefits Administration computes a value called excess credits. This is an important value, because an organization can choose to treat excess credits in a variety of ways. Excess credits can appear on the paycheck as net additional pay, they can simply be forfeited “use it or lose it,” or they can be “rolled over” to automatically increase certain voluntary contributions such as savings plans and flexible spending accounts. Normally, excess credits are calculated by:

Total of All Flexible Credits - Total of All Before Tax Costs

You can override the Total of All Before Tax Costs portion of the calculation with plan types and deduction codes of your choice. For U.S. based companies, normally you will not override this calculation. However, Canadian based companies may need to implement a more complex set of deductions.

Page Used to Set Up Excess Credit Calculations

Page Name	Object Name	Navigation	Usage
Excess Credit Tbl (excess credit table)	EXCESS_CRDT_CALC	Set Up HRMS, Product Related, Automated Benefits, Flex Credit Management, Excess Credit Calculations, Excess Credit Tbl	Enter excess credit calculations.

Entering Excess Credit Calculations

Access the Excess Credit Tbl page.

Enter the plan types and deduction classifications that you want the system to include when calculating the excess credit amount.