Before you can enroll employees and their dependents in your employer’s benefit plans, you must set up the benefit plans and any benefit rate tables referenced by those plans.
After the benefit plans are set up, you can use Sage HRMS to determine which employees are eligible for each plan and calculate coverage, premiums, and employee contributions.
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 insurance plans, coverage varies according to the participant's job group, salary, seniority, or benefit choices.
- Premiums - Premiums are the monthly amounts paid to the insurance company for coverage. Employee premiums are the amounts paid for the individual employee’s coverage (no matter how those amounts are distributed between employee and employer). Dependent premiums are the amounts paid for covering an employee's dependents. Premiums are always monthly amounts.
- Contribution - The contribution is the amount paid by the employee for the benefits received. This amount may be less than the premium if the employer pays part of the premium.
Setting up benefit plans
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 in Sage HRMS:
Step 5 - Select open enrollment insurance plans
Step 6 - Select open enrollment savings plans
Step 7 - Update open enrollment rate tables (if needed)
Enrolling employees in benefit plans
After the benefit plans are set up, you can enroll employees and their dependents using one of the following methods:
- For new hires or rehired employees, complete the Benefit Enrollment step in the Add New Hire or Rehire Employee tasks.
- For existing employees, open the employees' Insurance Benefits page and Savings Benefits page to 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.
Tip: 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 to gain a better understanding of benefit plans and rate tables and how to design each plan to best serve your employer's needs.