Force-Finalizing Participant Events

When you tell the system to finalize a participant event, it brings that event to an FE process status, even if it has been processed with errors. If the event is at a process status of ET or EE (election error), the system loads the participant's valid elections to the Manage Base Benefits business process tables. If the event is at any other process status, the system applies the appropriate default elections and loads them into the Base Benefit tables. The system also applies and loads default elections to replace elections that have been made in error.

You can force-finalize individual participants with the Final check box on either the Event Status Update page or the Controls page of the Processing Controls Update component. On the next run of the Benefits Administration process, the system automatically force-finalizes all participants with the Final check box selected.

If you're processing an Open Enrollment schedule, you can force-finalize all of the participants within that schedule. You'll arrange this when you set up the run control for the Benefits Administration process.

Open Enrollment schedules can be force-finalized because this method fits in with the nature of the Open Enrollment process, which has a finite set of start and end points. At the end of the enrollment period, you would force-finalize any employees who hadn't yet made their elections. Presumably, the open enrollment event rules that you create would enforce your business policies regarding failures to make positive elections (or reelections) in certain critical or regulated plan types.

Event Maintenance schedules, on the other hand, are processed on an ongoing basis. Each employee in a typical Event Maintenance schedule can be associated with a variety of different events and triggered actions at a given point in time. As you process certain events for the participant, more events are triggered for later Event Maintenance processing. The Event Maintenance procedure has no end, so enabling the forced finalization of an entire Event Maintenance schedule does not make sense isn't reasonable.