We are pleased to announce the upcoming release of BenefitElect (BE). As always, we hope the new features demonstrate our commitment to offering you, our clients, software that is designed to help you be successful as you navigate the world that is Benefit Administration. Here are some of the features and bugs addressed in this release.
Break in Service
Improvements for handling employees during the overlap period when crossing plan years have been made. Please reach out to your System Analyst if you are interested in hearing further details.
Employee Home
The following Termination Reasons have been added to the system:
- Reason Code | Reason
- 41 FMLA Ends
- 42 COVID-Furlough
- 43 ADAAA/WC
- 44 Non-Payment
**Note, this was deployed ahead of the official release deployment.
The system will now remember the last “Date” sort order that was applied when reviewing the Status grid under the Employment tab of an employee. Example, if you prefer to see the status data in the Status grid in Descending date order, click on the word “Date” in the grid header and it will adjust as it always has. The difference is that the system will now remember that you did a Descending sort and upon your next and future reviews, the data will always show in Descending order unless you change it.
Evidence of Insurability
Expanded EOI configuration to apply early entrant rules to dependents (functionality previously existed for employees only) has been added to the system for certain benefit types such as Supplemental and Disability options. Please contact your System Analyst if you would like to hear more about this feature.
Enrollment Site
There is now the ability to show Text instead of an actual form when EOI is required for a particular benefit. A use case might be where EOI is handled directly with the carrier and so text with instructions and/or a link to the carrier’s site is all that would be required when employee is going through the enrollment process.
Reporting
Scheduling weekly reports has been improved so that if a specific weekday is not specified by the user, the system will default to the day of the week of the date of the first report run.
IBC & IBC Log
The IBC Log has been re-organized for easier review. Errors will now be grouped into their own section at the bottom of the report, and within the Errors section, errors are sorted by the type of error.
The Log has been improved to reflect the employee’s id (instead of just the name) when there is an error reported.
In addition, some warning messages have been improved to better reflect the situation for the user.
Improved handling of fields coming in with empty values which correlates to unnecessary errors being reported on the log.
User Defined Date fields 1-3 can be configured to trigger life events now when the data for the employee has changed on the incoming IBC file. Please contact your System Analyst if you are interested in hearing more about this functionality.
The IBC process will now ignore any value in the “BenefitCalcDate” field in the IBC file when processing an employee record with a status of T – Terminated or D – Deceased. In addition, if the above statuses are uploaded and the “LastStatusDate” is not populated, an error will appear in the error section of the IBC Log report.
Life Events
System has been improved to automatically refresh the most recent confirmation statement when the effective date is changed upon approving a Life Event. The HR Admin will no longer have to contact BenefitElect to refresh the confirmation on their behalf.
Notifications
A new Notification can now be sent to a New Hire (whether they come in via Inbound Census or added via the application) to let them know they can enroll in benefits. The notice can include a link to BenefitElect to facilitate enrollment. **Note, there are a few exceptions based upon configuration. Please reach out to your System Analyst if you would like to hear more about this feature.
A new Notification can now be sent to employees letting them know when their benefits will go into effect based upon an HR Admin’s approving a life event. Please reach out to your System Analyst if you would like to hear more about this feature.
Ability to define the employees’ default Preferred Notification Type as Text or Email has been added. If you are interested in having the default of Email changed to Text for all your employees, please contact your System Analyst. **Note, regardless of default, employees can change their preferred method upon registration.
A new Notification can now be configured to let employees know that their benefits will take effect at a certain number of days ahead of their effective date. Please reach out to your System Analyst if you would like to hear more about this feature.
User Management
New checkbox option added per user under Admin User Management entitled “Allow Editing SSN”. If enabled, the HR Admin user will be able to click into the SSN field for an employee and modify the value. Note: if the user has “read only” only access to employee fields, the new setting is ignored.
Issues Resolved
Auto-Eligibility
Addressed issue with overage dependents receiving incorrect stop dates in the unique scenario where Auto-Eligibility ran during a new plan year when the dependent was aged out during the previous plan year.
Auto-Eligibility process improved to mark employees with errors and continue processing the remaining employees.
Improved error messaging appears on Auto-eligibility report in scenarios surrounding over-age dependents.
Auto-Mapping
Addressed scenario where stop dates were not always applied correctly in previous elections. **Note, issue was addressed with clients directly, ahead of this deployment.
Close Open Enrollment
Addressed scenario during the COE process where employees were not enrolled with the correct amount in a new plan year due to the multiplier value not being applied correctly when the value was not a whole number.
Enrollment Site
Resolved scenario where rehires going through enrollment process were unable to add new beneficiaries.
Improvements in the display of the About your Dependent screen to employees.
Employees no longer will receive error when resetting their password, when their Home phone (or any phone for that matter) has a leading space in the field.
Corrected the scenario where an employee’s Work Hours in Week was set to 0 while the employee’s information was being updated on the About you page.
Inbound Census
Resolved IBC failing in scenario where “BenefitCalcDate” was not populated in the incoming file.
EOI
Corrected issue where EOI was triggering when it was not required in a scenario where the requested coverage amount was lower than the Issued coverage amount.
