Benefit Information Automation

When you implement PeopleSoft Benefits Administration, your first area of focus will be your benefit information. Using PeopleSoft terminology, benefit information includes programs, plan types, plans, rates, and calculation rules. All of this information is defined within the Manage Base Benefits business process in PeopleSoft Human Resources (HR).

PeopleSoft Benefits Administration enables you to link eligibility and event processing rules to your benefit programs, plan types, and benefit plan options.

For benefit plan types, you can set up rates as age-graded, flat, percentage-of-salary, or service-related, depending on your requirements. Calculation rules include as of dates for age, service, premium and coverage calculations, rounding rules, and minimum and maximum coverage amounts.

For benefit programs, these rules enable the system to automate benefits processing at the program level, meaning that the system can combine employee data with eligibility and event rules to determine whether to create, keep, or terminate employee benefit program assignments. With event maintenance, existing employees will have their benefit eligibility change in response to certain events that ordinarily require a revision of personal benefit information, such as divorce, a transfer in location, or a switch from part-time to full-time employment.

In addition to defining costs for benefit options (through the Manage Base Benefits business process), PeopleSoft Benefits Administration enables you to attach your rates and calculation rules to flexible credits. These can include general program-level credits (granted when employees participate in a benefit program), general plan-level credits (granted when employees enroll in any benefit option within the plan type), and option-level credits (granted when an employee elects a specific benefit option).

Use Benefits Administration tables to set up and run your automated benefit system—the event maintenance, open enrollment, and flexible benefits processes that take the hard labor out of benefits information management. After you define event rules, eligibility rules, and flexible credits, you can combine and recombine them with your current benefit information to produce the automated system that best fits the specific needs of your company.

You link eligibility and event processing rules to the benefit programs offered by your organization, thus automating your benefit system at the program level. The system can combine employee data with these rules to determine whether to create, keep, or terminate employee benefit program assignments. In this way, new hires and existing employees can be automatically enrolled, or their elections automatically solicited, both throughout the year and during periods of open enrollment (or for federal users, during benefits open season).

When the time comes to redefine your PeopleSoft Benefits Administration system, you won't have to redefine your entire set of event rules, eligibility rules, and flexible credits. You modify the rules and credits in question with the same page that you used to create them.

Two plan types might use the same set of event rules in one program and different event rules in another. After you define the two sets of event rules, link the appropriate set of event rules with each benefit program and plan type combination.

Multiple Currency Usage

When you work with multiple currencies for an employee, be aware that PeopleSoft Benefits Administration doesn't support the multiple currency conversion required to perform premium calculations. For example, if you pay employees in Swiss CHF and enroll them in a benefit program that uses United States USD, Benefits Administration cannot perform a currency conversion to any base currency. If you don't use multiple currencies, you can easily process them using Benefits Administration.

For more information, see: Understanding Currency