Set Up Benefits

Before you can enroll employees and their dependents in your employer’s benefit plans, you must first set up your benefit rate tables and benefit plans.

Sage HRMS calculates your benefits quickly and easily. After you define your plans, you can direct Sage HRMS to determine which employees are eligible for which plans and to calculate coverage, premium and employee contribution information.

Understanding Benefits

To work with your employer’s various benefit plans, you must first understand the following terms and their definitions:

Coverage - Coverage is the amount of benefits an insurance plan provides to eligible employees. In some insurance plans, coverage is the same for all participants. For other participants, coverage varies according to the participant's job group, salary, seniority, or benefit choices.
Premiums - Premiums are the monthly amounts paid for coverage. In Sage HRMS, employee premiums are the amounts paid to the insurance company for the individual employee’s coverage, no matter how those amounts are distributed between employee and employer. Dependent premiums are the amounts paid to the insurance company for dependent coverage. Premiums are always monthly amounts.
Contribution - A contribution is the amount paid by the employee for the benefits received. Sage HRMS calculates the appropriate employee contribution based on the information you enter.

Setting Up Benefits

Follow these steps when you set up benefit plans:

Step 1 -	Set Up Benefit Type Code Tables
Step 2 -	Set Up Benefit Rate Tables
Step 3 -	Set Up Insurance Plans (referencing rate tables, if appropriate)
Step 4 -	Set Up Savings Plans (referencing rate tables, if appropriate)

If you are using Sage ESS for Benefits Enrollment, follow these additional steps:

Step 5 -	Set Up Open Enrollment Insurance Plans
Step 6 -	Set Up Open Enrollment Savings Plans
Step 7 -	Set Up Open Enrollment Rate Tables

Enrolling Employees in Benefit Plans

After you set up your benefit plans and plan rates, you are ready to enroll employees and their dependents using one of the following methods:

Complete the Benefit Enrollment step in the Add New Hire or Rehire Employee tasks.
Open the Insurance Benefits and Savings Benefits pages and enter enrollment information.
If you are using Sage ESS for Benefits Enrollment, complete the open enrollment setup steps in Sage ESS and notify your employees that they can start the open enrollment process.

Sage HRMS provides a sample employer, Dunedin Enterprises, so you can experiment with the many features of Sage HRMS. We recommend you experiment with benefit setup using Dunedin Enterprises to gain an even better understanding of benefit plans and rate tables and how to design each plan to best serve your employer's needs.