4min
Any time there's a manual process - whether it's reviewing new applicants or modifying life-change events - there's a possibility of human error. In benefits billing, reportedly as much as 15% of the invoice may contain errors according to Aberdeen Group. To make this less abstract, we are pleased to announce the release of our Liability Calculator, an simple tool that helps estimate the potential liability associated with manual benefits reconciliation. Companies with as few as 1,000 employees, may be surprised to discover how missed errors can quickly amount to a large unnecessary expenses. In order to eliminate this risk, companies should explore automated benefits reconciliation solution to automate 'benefits billing checking'. In addition to preventing money leakage, automating benefits reconciliation comes with these 3 advantages:
Saving Time
Until recently, the only way to understand monthly benefits billing was to check invoices against payroll and enrollment data manually. Think spreadsheets, highlighters, hours of cross-references particularly for companies with a large number of employees and several benefit programs. Most Benefits Specialists agree, that this is one of the most tedious, and unrewarding of all of the HR processes. Hearing this feedback, we were inspired to launch our Benefits Reconciliation solution in 2017, a tool that cuts down this process from hours to just a few minutes each month. As one of our clients said, “I no longer use excel spreadsheets and payroll software to view individual benefit records. " This client reported saving 85% of their total time on this task each month, giving them extra bandwidth to focus on other HR initiatives.
Eliminate Benefits Billing Errors
With new employees enrolling in benefits and others dropping coverage or changing elections, errors can happen. For example, carriers might continue invoicing for employees that are no longer with the company, something that happens when the HR platform doesn't communicate with payroll. Acting as a technology interface between carriers and payroll/HCM systems, our automated benefits reconciliation solution compares carrier invoices against employee deductions and enrollments to eliminate over-payments, under-payments, and other irregulaties. The solution catches errors on the fly, so the organization won't run into a situation where an error is missed for any amount of time.
Reduce Benefits Liability
The world of employee benefits is highly regulated, and companies can incur heavy fines for noncompliance in administering benefits. For example, just missing a COBRA enrollment for an employee’s eligible dependent can subject a company to thousands of dollars in fines. In addition to financial loss, the Liability Calculator measures a company’s COBRA liability exposure, putting benefits compliance risk in real dollar terms. If a terminated employee enrolls in COBRA, but the effective date or premium amount is inaccurate in carrier bills or payroll records, Benefits Reconciliation will flag and highlight the error so it can be addressed.
As you can tell, our team is gung-ho on benefits automation, and all our solutions aim to eliminate manual processes and issues they can create. We’re excited to offer the HR community our Benefits Reconciliation Calculator as a tool to help measure the costs related to compliance exposure and billing errors. When used in conjunction with our Benefits Reconciliation solution, companies rest assured that their benefits billing is taken care of.
