Top 5 Pain Points of Employee Benefits Billing

For HR professionals, navigating the complexities of employee benefits billing can feel like running an obstacle course blindfolded when the unexpected happens. Understanding the challenges you face, and we’re here to shed light on the top five pain points of employee benefits billing and offer solutions that can streamline your processes and free up your valuable time.

Pain Point #1: The Data Deluge: Juggling Bills and Enrollment from Multiple Providers and Platforms

The modern benefits landscape is a sprawling ecosystem of providers, platforms, and data sources. From health insurance carriers to voluntary benefits vendors, each entity has its own billing system, data format, timing, and cutoffs. This creates a tangled web for HR teams, requiring them to constantly log in to different portals and manually compare data to generate accurate reports and reconcile bills.

Solution: A Unified Command Center

A central hub for all benefit billing data including real-time enrollment information, payroll deductions, and vendor invoices is key. One that integrates seamlessly with your existing HRIS (Human Resource Information System) and can connect with various carriers and vendors is ideal. This eliminates the need to toggle between different platforms and ensures consistency in data formats.

Pain Point #2: The Data Dance: Keeping Everything in Sync

Post-enrollment changes like employee additions, terminations, and mid-year plan modifications are inevitable. However, maintaining data accuracy across enrollment systems, payroll deductions, and carrier/vendor platforms can be a logistical nightmare. Manual updates are prone to errors and inconsistencies, leading to billing discrepancies that are complicated to get back on track, wasted time spent on corrections, and costly budget overages when your company foots the bill for missed premium deductions.

Solution: Automation is Your Friend

You need a system where data can be synchronized across all connected platforms. When an employee makes a change during open enrollment or throughout the year, the system flags the updates so you can update your payroll system and transmit the new information to the relevant carrier or vendor in a timely fashion. This eliminates the time lag that usually happens between when changes happen and when updates get caught and implemented.

Pain Point #3: The Manual Marathon: The Tedious Task of Bill Auditing

Benefits bill auditing is a labor-intensive process, requiring meticulous attention to detail for multiple carriers/vendors. HR teams need to scrutinize bills for accuracy, verify plan details, and identify any discrepancies. This time-consuming task when completed manually can be error-prone and inconsistent, as well as divert your focus away from strategic initiatives and employee relations.

Solution: Smart Auditing Tools

A winning SaaS solution can provide your company with built-in auditing tools using sophisticated algorithms to analyze benefit bills against your plan configurations and employee enrollment and payroll deduction data. They can flag potential errors and inconsistencies, allowing you to quickly identify and address any issues. This streamlines the auditing process and saves you valuable time.

Pain Point #4: The Missed Deduction Maze: Dealing with the Fallout

Missed payroll deductions for employee benefits can be a major headache. Not only does it lead to frustrated employees, but it also creates additional work for HR and payroll to resolve the issue with carriers and potentially chase down unpaid contributions. Simply adding a double deduction to the next pay period may cause hardship to the employee, and there is risk of reverting back to the original amount on a timely basis.

Solution: Proactive Management

A software solution with enhanced payroll deduction synchronization capabilities can provide deduction tracking and reporting. Find one that identifies any missed deductions and provides robust tools to re-synchronize the deductions. This can usually resolve the issue before it escalates. It not only minimizes disruption for your employees but also helps maintain your relationship with carriers and vendors as well as helping with cash management.

Pain Point #5: The Service Snafu: Troubleshooting Delivery Mishaps

When employees encounter problems with their benefits, they often turn to HR for assistance. This can involve troubleshooting issues with service providers, eligibility verification, or claim processing delays. HR professionals end up playing detective, spending time resolving problems that could be better addressed by the benefits provider directly.

Solution: Bypass Mishaps Altogether

If you have a streamlined, automated solution in place, you can bypass most, if not all, of these service-related mishaps. When your company is auditing premium bills on a monthly basis and comparing both the enrollment data and payroll deduction data against invoices, HR teams can quickly identify issues and resolve them before they turn into delivery mishaps. CFOs stay happy when benefits budgets stay on track, employees are satisfied with plan year billing moving ahead smoothly, and you are free to focus on creating a positive and productive work environment for your employees.

Is your organization is Interested in learning more about benefits billing SaaS solutions that streamline and automate? Reach out to your AssuredPartners team today to learn more about the benefits they may be able to provide to your organization.