This chapter contains these topics:
Managing an efficient benefit office for many employees and an assortment of plans can entail time consuming and labor-intensive periodic processes. Managing enrollment processes includes the following tasks:
Managing Open Enrollment
Ending Enrollment in All Plans
Many companies allow employees to change their benefit plan selections once each year. During this open enrollment, employees can choose new benefit plans.
If the rates for any of the plans your company offers have changed, you must update the DBAs and plan masters to reflect the rate changes. When the rate information is accurate, you can inform employees of the plans and options they have available.
You can send employees copies of their confirmation statements and enrollment forms. Employees use the confirmation statements to verify in which plans they are currently enrolled. They can then use their enrollment forms to select new benefit plan coverage.
When the employees return their enrollment forms to the benefit office, you will need to update the enrollment information. To ensure that your information correctly reflects the changes requested by the employees during open enrollment, you might need to follow the steps for any of the following tasks:
End enrollment in the old plan or option
Enroll employees in a new plan or option
Change employee contributions to current plans or options
From Human Resources (G08), choose Benefits Administration
From Benefits Administration (G08B1), choose Batch Enrollment
You can run a batch program to end enrollment in all benefit plans for a large number of employees. Use this when all the benefit plans change for a specific group of employees or if the company must lay off a large number of employees. Additionally, some companies run a version of this program on a regular schedule to end enrollment for all terminated employees.
Although you use this batch program to enroll employees, you can use it to terminate enrollment when you do one or both of the following:
Use a specific benefit status code in the employees' records
Identify the group category or a specific plan in the processing options for this batch program
You should run the batch program in proof mode and review the reports before processing the final termination. The reports list all employees who will be terminated from all benefit plans
If you terminate enrollment in all plans because your company is implementing new plans for the group, you can run the batch program again to enroll the employees in the new plans when the batch program to end the old plans completes.