Understanding the Benefits Administration Process

As part of a total compensation package, companies typically provide benefit plans for their employees. Benefit plans vary among companies, organizations, and industries. However, most benefit plans include medical insurance, life insurance, and retirement and investment programs. Additionally, a company might offer various plan options.

You enroll employees in benefits plans so that they can participate in the benefit that the organization offers. Depending on how you set up benefit plans and the eligibility standards for employees or groups of employees, you can use one or more of these methods to enroll employees in the plans:

• Enrollment with eligibility

• Enrollment overrides

• Batch enrollment

• Self service enrollment

When you enroll employees in benefit plans that have eligibility requirements, you typically use the enrollment with eligibility method. With this method, the system verifies that employees meet the eligibility requirements before it enrolls them in a plan. You can also use batch enrollment to globally enroll employees who are eligible for enrollment. You typically use batch enrollment to enroll employees in mandatory and default plans.

In some cases, you might need to waive eligibility requirements for an employee. For example, suppose that you rehire an employee who previously worked for the organization for 10 years. In that case, you might waive the eligibility requirements for the employee. When you enroll the employee in benefit plans, you use enrollment overrides to waive the eligibility requirements of those plans.

You can provide an additional service to employees and reduce data entry by enabling self service benefits enrollment. With self service enrollment, employees use a website on the company's intranet to enroll in or change their own benefits during an open enrollment period—or when they are hired or have life changes, such as marriage. The system stores the changes that employees make in work files, which the system then updates to the live benefits tables.

You need to maintain accurate and current information to successfully administer benefit plans for all employees in the company. After you enroll employees in benefit plans, you can perform these tasks:

• Correct or change employee and enrollment information.

• Manage plan changes and open enrollment.

For each employee, you can produce a benefits statement that indicates the amount that both the employee and the company have contributed to the employee's benefits, taxes, and other compensation.