Understanding Plan Participation Definition

Use the participation function to establish age, service, and possibly plan entry date requirements that employees must meet before they begin to accrue pension benefits.

If you have a service requirement, you must create a service function result to measure service for participation purposes. This may be different from the service function result used when measuring plan service accrual. This is because participation service often measures service from hire date, whereas plan service usually measures service from participation date.

Participation Results

A participation function result returns:

A yes or no status for the given event date.
The date, actual or projected, when the employee met or will meet the participation requirements.

The participation function result name references the status.

When the participation status is Not Participating, the calculation ends without calculating a benefit. While this is normally the only use for the participation status result, you can reference this status for other reasons.

Set up a function result alias in order to reference the participation date. Although this alias is not required, the calculation gives a warning if there isn't one. By defining the function result alias even if you're not going to use it, you spare your users this warning.

You can integrate participation requirements into other functions (such as service) by referencing the participation date. For example, on the service parameter pages you can exclude service prior to this date.

Refer to the participation status (the yes or no result) to incorporate, for example, participation requirements into a custom statement with criteria such as the following: If participation status equals Y