April 2, 2020

We are excited to announce an upcoming new release of BenefitElect (BE). We hope the new features demonstrate our commitment to offering you, our clients, software that is designed to help you meet your challenges. Here are some of the features that are included.

Enhanced Mobile Compatibility

We made some enhancements to the BenefitElect4.6 theme, which is designed to scale in order to display BenefitElect enrollment screens properly on mobile devices. Please contact your Analyst if you would like to apply this theme to your Case. We can apply it to a Test environment first for your review.

Special Category Rates

We added functionality to Medical, Dental, and Vision plans, which allows you to offer different pricing based on a pre-defined employee attribute. These attributes can be based on any data field now used to define a classification in BE. For example: we can accommodate different costs for a single plan based on an employee’s tribal affiliation, state or participation in a wellness program.

Employee Classification Process

We made major improvements to the processes involved in confirmations and record state in order to reduce issues caused when an employee changes classification and is no longer eligible for benefits they are currently enrolled in.

Ad Hoc Text Notifications

In a recent release, we introduced ad hoc email notifications which BE can send out to groups of your employees on specific days surrounding Open Enrollment or even on a specific day. With this release, we have made enhancements to ad hoc notification functionality, including the ability to send text messages in addition to email notices.

**Note, configuring the notification is handled by your Analyst, so please contact BE when you would like to send a message to your employees.

Report Optimization

We made some server processing improvements to reduce report run times and deliver reports to you more quickly after submission.

Security Enhancements

We continually strive to provide a secure environment for your benefits administration, so in this release we made some security updates that include moving to one-time-use security tokens for all service methods used internally only. This change is not visible to end users but enhances our platform security and is part of our on-going efforts. If you would like more detailed, technical information, please contact your Analyst.

Issues Resolved

EOI Denial Issues

HR Admins have reported some situations where the EOI flag was not removed when denying EOI for an employee. We have corrected the system so that all EOI denials and approvals are now processed as expected.

Inbound Census Errors

When processing a CSV-formatted inbound census file, the system was occasionally logging some errors but not providing those errors to the HR Admin. Useful messaging is now provided to assist in troubleshooting issues within the file.

Beneficiaries in Open Enrollment

This issue applies to Cases configured to collect beneficiaries on one screen. We have corrected an issue affecting some clients where beneficiaries on file from a previous plan year were not displaying to the employee after making their elections for the current year.

Inbound Census Validation

We have applied more stringent validation on numeric columns in the inbound census, particularly the EmployeeID column, to prevent invalid data from being uploaded into BenefitElect. Be aware that this might impact your current process for creating inbound census files. If you have any problems or questions, please contact your Analyst.

Please reach out to your system analyst or send an email to support@benefitelect.com if you have any questions.