Approving enrollments

Run the Approve Enrollment process as employees finish their open enrollment elections and submit them to you for approval. This process enables you to verify that employees have begun their enrollment and their submitted enrollments are correct and complete. Note that the system marks the date and time when an employee submits their enrollment.

As long as the open enrollment period is still In Progress, you can run this approval process as many times as necessary to make sure that all employees' enrollments are approved. When you approve or reject an employee's enrollments, the system sends the employee an appropriate notification to their Message Center.

Employees' enrollments are validated by the system to make sure they are correct and complete. If there are errors or omissions, the Benefit Enrollment Checklist page provides the information as to what they need to do to complete their enrollment. Refer to Validating Employee Enrollment for a complete list of validation messages.

You can also use the Enrollment Exceptions report and the Enrollment report to see the employees' enrollment statuses and which employees' enrollments have exceptions that need to be corrected.

To approve open enrollment:

1. On the Administrator menu, select Benefit Updates > Approve Open Enrollment.
2. On the Approve Open Enrollment page, select the Enrollment Period you want to start approving. All periods with a status of In Progress are included in the list.
3. Select the appropriate employer.
4. From the Search list, select the search criteria for finding employees who have been processed for this open enrollment period:
   • To find all employees, select All.
   • To find a specific employee, select Employee Last Name and enter the last name
   • To find only those employees who have enrollment exceptions (such as not complete or incorrect selections) select Exceptions Only.
   • To find employees with a specific enrollment status, select Enrollment Status and select a status:
     • Not Started. The employee has been processed for open enrollment but has not yet started enrollment.
     • In Progress. The employee has begun enrollment but has not yet submitted enrollments for approval.
     • Pending. The enrollment is waiting to be approved (or rejected). If it has an exception, it will be re-selected when the status is changed to Approved.
     • Rejected. The enrollment record was rejected, but can be changed to approved, at which time it is re-selected for exceptions.

     • Approved. The enrollment record has been approved. When the period is closed, approved records will be updated in Sage HRMS.

       The Enrollment Status displays at the top of each page as an employee goes through the open enrollment wizard. However, the enrollment status the employee sees is slightly different, as shown in the following table.

       Status seen by administrators and employees

        

       Status seen by the administrator	Status seen by the employee
       Not Started	Incomplete
       In Progress	Incomplete
       Pending	Approval Pending
       Approved	Approved
       Updated	Approved

5. Click Go to start the search. For maximum efficiency, the search results are limited to the first set of 100 employees who have not yet been approved. After you review and approve the first set of 100, start the search again to return the next set of unapproved employees. Continue searching until you have reviewed all employees for approval. As an alternative, you can use the Auto Approve Enrollment page to quickly approve all employees in a specific enrollment period.
6. Review the list of employees by clicking (the expand arrows) to see the details of their benefit elections. As you review, determine who is ready to be approved and who needs to revisit their enrollments and correct any exceptions. More...
   • Click the Questions link to review the answers to required enrollment questions.
   • If information is missing, it is noted as an exception.
   • If a benefit plan was changed or deleted between the time the employee enrolled and the time you approve the enrollment, it is possible that the system will return an exception message and remove the employee's elections in the plan. As a result, if you run the approval process a second time, additional exception messages may occur.
   1. For exception employees, you can add a Note to let them know what they need to do to correct their enrollment. Use the Enrollment Exceptions or Enrollment report for assistance.
   2. For employees who are ready to be approved (in Pending status), select the Approved status to approve them one by one or click Approve All to approve them all at once.
7. Click Save when you are finished. The system sends a standard approve or reject notification (and a note if one was added) to each employee's Message Center. Note that if any enrollment records that were set to Approved have exceptions, the enrollment record is reset to Pending. Refer to Enrollment Update Errors for information on exceptions.