Taking Care of Benefits

The annual employee benefits enrollment period provides the opportunity for employees to update or change their benefits selections. While this is usually a once-a-year process, changes are necessary throughout the year when onboarding new hires, terminating an employee, or managing life events such as the birth of a child, the loss of a family member, or a change in marital status. The process is always time consuming and, if data is manually entered, it’s also prone to error.

Because of this, many companies are turning to technology for help. According to recent survey, 51% of employers use HR technology for benefits enrollment and 40% for benefits administration. And 78% of employers use some combination of external and in-house resources or fully outsource the process. It’s more efficient in terms of both time and money. Other advantages to using some form of benefits technology cited by participants in the survey were ensuring legal compliance and improving workforce engagement.

Manual data entry required

However, even if employees sign up on a benefits manager portal, once they complete enrollment, that data still must be entered into the HRMS and Payroll systems, keeping track of updates in census information as well as employee balances, premiums, and contributions.

Integrating Core HR and benefits systems

Enabling an HRMS system and the benefits manager portal to “talk to” one another eliminates the need for all that manual or duplicate data entry. For example, say an employee moves and needs their address updated in both HRMS and the benefits manager. Or they are promoted and have a new job title that entitles them to expanded benefits offerings. A “digital conversation” between HRMS and the benefits manager would eliminate the need for the employee to make changes in both systems. “Done in one” means “done in both.”

And what about changes made in the benefits manager’s portal? Perhaps an employee has added a new dependent to their benefits policy. If the employer’s HRMS system and the benefits manager portal talk to each other, the change made in the portal would electronically be entered into the HRMS.

How are you doing?

How are you handling your employee benefits? Are you still manually entering benefits data into your system? If you have Sage HRMS, we can help you integrate your HRMS with the benefit administrator you use. Benefit Portal Interface for Sage HRMS provides a two-way conversation between Sage HRMS and your third-party benefit portal.

Visit our web page to learn more about Benefit Portal Interface for Sage HRMS.  Use the “CONTACT SALES” button or give us a call at 888.421.2004. We’d like to help you make keeping benefits data up to date fast and easy.