Benefit plans often require complex calculations depending upon a number of different factors. Coverage, premiums, and contribution calculations can vary according to an employee's age, income, years of service, or other factors.
For example, an employee's life insurance coverage may depend on the employees salary. The premium for an employee's dependents may depend on the number of dependents enrolled.
Benefit plan options
When you set up the benefit plans, Sage HRMS provides the following options to specify coverage, employee and dependent premiums, and contributions:
If you leave the item blank, Sage HRMS does not use automatic benefit calculation for this item and you can manually enter an amount for each employee on their Insurance Benefits page.
You should leave the item blank if the item does not apply to this type of insurance (such as coverage for a dental plan or a dependent premium for employee life insurance)
If you enter a zero, the fixed amount is zero (0). For example, the dependent premium for employee life insurance is always zero.
Note: A zero (0) does not disable automatic benefit calculation. If you enter a zero, automatic benefit calculation replaces any number you previously entered on the employees benefit pages with a zero.
That item for each affected employee is automatically set to this amount. If the amount changes (as it would whenever the insurance company raises rates), you can correct the amount on the page for the insurance plan; then all employees who have the benefit will update automatically.
To enter a fixed dollar amount, such as $10,000 of coverage, enter the amount without a dollar sign or comma: 10000
You can enter a mathematical formula using the data in your systems databases. For example, enter the formula 2*ANNUAL() to specify two times the employees annual pay.
To insert expressions using items from the Personnel or Benefits database, click the Expression Builder button to open the Expression Builder where you can build an expression for the plan calculations. For more information, see Using the Expression Builder.
Note: You must precede referenced data from the employee Benefit database with "BE." to signify it originates from the Benefits database rather than the Employee Personnel database.
If you are familiar with expressions, you can type them directly. You can use the Expression Builder to set up the expression. For more information, see Using the Expression Builder.
For example, you can use an expression to calculate 20% of an employees salary for the coverage amount of a disability insurance policy.
Use rate tables to test for specific conditions and to perform complex calculations. With rate tables, the calculations are defined once and then referenced instead of needing to repeatedly type the calculations. Use rate tables to specify coverage, premium, and contribution amounts. For more information, see Benefit rate tables.
For example, a rate table can specify different monthly premiums for employees based on age, gender, and whether or not they smoke.