Special Pay - Based on Benefit coverage Option

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Mark Ivankovich
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We are implementing Lawson HR/PR and have a question regarding special pay for employees.

We give a flat amount of pay to employees who elects "Family" coverage for the Medical benefit plan.

Our PR Dept. currently process this in our legacy system through an interface program that reads the employees benefit election and creates the pay transaction for a flat amount of pay.

How do you recommend we setup this up in our new Lawson system to ensure all employees with this coverage option get paid their special pay amount during the payroll cycle so that we can eliminate an interface?

Thanks!
Jodi Kruesel
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Could you use Employee Groups to create a group of those with the coverage you are referring to. You could then attach the Employee Group to PR30 Standard Time Records with the amount of pay that you are trying to give the employee. This will require you to run PR134 during your payroll cycle to pull in the PR30 records.

I think this approach should work. We use PR30 for many things and it works great.



Margie Gyurisin
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Why do you pay them a flat amount today. Is it to offset the cost if they choose family coverage? If so, can you handle it by setting up the premiums on the benefit screen side to increase the company portion and decrease the employee portion of those costs. It should give you the same net effect.
Jodi Kruesel
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Margie has a good point. Are you trying to do a one-time payment to the employee for a flat dollar amount or is it an ongoing payment that happens each pay period? If it is on-going and the end result is that you are trying to reduce their premium then modifying you're benefit set-up may be the best option. Do you have Lawson benefits? If not, the PR30 could also be used.
Mark Ivankovich
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Hi Jodi and Margi!

Thank you so much for the quick responses...yes, we pay a flat amount $103.80 to employees that elect Family coverage for the medical plan.

This happens every payroll period.

We don't have the option to simply decrease the employee premium cost and increase the employer side because we're state mandated to charge these premium amounts.

The way to go would be setting the employee group up that you mentioned...however, it only gives options to build a group based on hr11 fields/data and not benefits.

Do you have some other suggestions...again, i appreciate your help and input greatly!


Jodi Kruesel
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Mark,

How many employees are we talking about? Do you know when they are electing family coverage or do you use self service to automate benefit enrollment and life events. If you know when they are electing, you could use a user field and then EE group/PR30.

Here's a thought, if you use HR13 to track dependents and whether or not they are covered for medical (on the coverage tab of HR13) this information will default to the Ben Flags tab of the HR11 and report the number of dependents covered. This field (Health Dependents)is then available to create an employee group which could then be used on PR30.

Wow, way to much thinking for a Friday afternoon!!

Mark Ivankovich
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Hi Jodi,

You are right, I'll save future questions like these for Monday's . I appreciate your willingess to share...

All of our employees elect benefits through a third party benefit providers website. We do not currently use ESS for benefits enrollment.

We receive a bi-weekly elections file from the benefit carrier and read it into lawson through a cobol interface program that formats the file for BN531, BN532 and HR513. Then we run all of these programs to get the benefit records into lawson.

I'll look at the ben flags tab to create the employee group...Great idea, i didn't think to look at any other possible field that we could create a group off of...
I'll let you know how it goes


Mark Ivankovich
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Well, i looked at the Health Dependents field and looks like it just captures a number of dependents covered under the employees health plan. We also need to be able to build the employee group based on the coverage option (emp + spouse, emp + children, family).
JWH
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Thought, move the employees that have the Family election into a seperate bn plan and attach an add to net deduction in the amount of the positive pay needed.
Mark Ivankovich
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Thanks JWH...I'll bring this up as an option...Doubt they would want to maintain 3 seperate Health plans, but worth a discussion for sure.

Thanks for your help!
Karen Ploof
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You are not using the flex plan set up, correct?
Mark Ivankovich
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Sorry Karen - revisiting this now as we need a solution....no we have not setup flex plan.
Karen Ploof
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You will still have the interface that creates the enrollments between the third party and Lawson's BN531, BN532 and HR13, right? Would it be too big a modification to add a file for PR30 (standard time records) if the employee elects Family medical coverage?

I don't have access to a system right now, but I think there is an interface program similar to BN531 for PR30?