A big hello, welcome to everybody. We’re so excited to be spending this time with you today.

Get ready. We have an insightful and incredible session hung up for you today. So with that, let’s get started with our webinar today.

To begin, I wanna go through a a couple of housekeeping items. Our webinar presentation is scheduled for sixty minutes, an hour. The presentation is focused on UKG ready, UKG ProClassic OELE, and, UKG Benadmin, benefits administration. Should you be on the presentation and you utilize benefits hub and want to know more about preparing for open enrollment or anything open open enrollment or benefits related on the ben bed hub side, please reach out to Jenny Rosengrand directly. Jenny can be reached in chat, or she’ll her contact information will be shared at the end of the presentation.

We do have a team that can help you. They’re just not in today’s presentation.

Another housekeeping item, everyone has been put put on mute for this presentation. We want to make sure that you can hear everybody and not interrupt it with any sort of background noise.

As mentioned way earlier, any questions that you have, please put them in the q and a section in Zoom or in the chat, and we will cover these at the end of the presentation or during the presentation as time permits.

And then the last housekeeping item is this meeting is being recorded, and it will be made available post presentation along with the slide deck and an FAQ. So with that, let’s get started with our presentation.

A quick introduction. My name is Sandy Munt, and I am the senior marketing manager here at Ascend. And I, as mentioned before, am in in the beautiful state of Colorado.

And I’m Jenny Rosenberg. I’m the senior manager for managed services, and I’m located in Minnesota.

Team?

I’m Morgan Maris. I’m one of the client success leads here at Ascend, and I’m located in Oregon.

Hi. I’m Jen McGrath. I am based out of Pittsburgh, PA. I am a pro solutions consultant focusing on benefits administration for which I’m also certified in.

My name is Britney Wittick. I am a team lead for our Premier Managed Services. I’ve been working in Ready since twenty fifteen, and I’m based out of New Hampshire.

Great. Thank you, everybody. As you can tell, we have a very experienced team to present today. For those of you on the webinar today that have not experienced what we call the Ascend experience, I’ll just give you a little bit about our organization and what the overview of the webinar is gonna be today.

We’re gonna go through a little bit about the open enrollment process and and general timeline, some key preparation tasks, general common gotchas and mistakes that our team have seen over the years of doing open enrollment with our customers. We’ll review some critical steps and key dates. And, definitely, we wanna show you some resources that are available to you, which includes open enrollment reports in each one of those perspective or individual applications. And then we’ll close with the answering of the many q and a’s that we possibly can get to.

And as mentioned, we’ll those that we can’t get to, we will send an FAQ document afterward get all of the questions answered.

Again, a little bit about Ascend. For more than two decades, we’ve been, an an implementation provider and a UKG partner since twenty sixteen. We’ve been, awarded eight UKG partner awards in this time frame, with the with the partner of the year in twenty twenty four. We are one hundred percent UKG, and we’re focused on the full suite.

So Ready, Pro, and WFM. We cover SMBs, the mall business, mid market, and enterprise. And we pride ourselves in white glove service, high touch, and very responsive support. So that’s a little bit about Ascend.

And now I’ll turn it over to Jenny.

Thank you, Sandy. So as Sandy mentioned, we are gonna be covering three three of the platforms, the Ready platform, the UPG Pro benefits platform, and the benefits administration platform. And, unfortunately, we are not covering Benhub. So if you do need something, you can just put it in chat, I can try to get get you connected.

Perfect.

And then the other thing is just that this is just a high level process overview on what the steps are. We’re gonna and we’ll be talking about this in each of the sections about preparing and planning, what those open enrollment activities look like, the configuration and tests, the go live and monitoring, and also the post open enrollment support.

And once again, here’s another timeline, you know, broken down by days. So we’re we’re in the ninety to one twenty days. We’re we’re working and you and your teams are working on finalizing the plan changes, rates, confirming your your start and end dates. We’re gonna move into data cleanup, and this is a super important part of the process where you’re gonna audit employee eligibility, make sure that things get fixed, like Social Security numbers, date of birth, and making sure all of the your benefit groups and policies are in place. We move in then into the building of the session, making sure that the plans and rates are configured, testing and environments and things of that nature. And then the next the last and final step is to validate and launch. And then everyone clap their hands because you’ve had a successful open enrollment.

And with that, we like to start our webinars off by by pull doing a quick poll of the audience. And we’re gonna launch a poll real quick. And what we would like to know is, is this the first time you’re using UKG for open enrollment, or have you conducted, open enrollment in the UKG solutions before? So are you a first timer? You’ve done it once before, or this isn’t your first rodeo. You’ve been doing this for a few times now. So we’ll give it a couple more seconds and just see what everybody’s coming in at, and the type of audience that we’re expecting today.

And to no surprise, and I don’t know if Jenny would agree, but to me, no surprise that we have a pretty split audience with us today.

If you want, Fiola, I think the the responses are kind of dwindling down.

Let’s go ahead and end our our poll and share the results with everybody.

So as everyone can see, it looks like there’s a lot of first timers on our call today, followed up by a few people that have already conducted this once or twice before and then some some complete newbies. So that’s fantastic to know.

We can stop sharing this one, and then we’re gonna share our second poll of the day and final one.

And what we’d like to know in this poll is what do you find is the most difficult part of open enrollment each year? Is it negotiations? Is it working with your broker? Is it actually the system configuration? Maybe it’s communication or training with the employees.

And last but not least, it’s all of the above. And this is the one question when we’ve done this type of open enrollment webinar before that many of us are surprised at what the actual the answer is for the group that’s gonna be joining us today.

And I think think when you share these results, because right now, it’s kinda going back and forth. And and the one that is leading is the one that that is always the top, and that’s why we conduct this webinar. So we’ll give this a few more minutes because the the polls are still coming in.

And my colleague, Viola, give it two give it five more seconds, then we’ll end this poll.

I think that’s good.

Why don’t we share those results, Viola?

So there you go, team. The number one, and it has been this way the last couple of years, and that is the most difficult area that everybody on this call is experiences, the actual system configuration within the platform itself. Yes. There are other things like supporting the employees, and that is always number two as well, whether that’s help them helping them with their benefit elections or system issues or eligibility or they’re using the wrong browser. Those are always the top two. And so we hope today’s presentation, we can help you with some of those system configuration issues or at least point you to some resources that can help you with that.

So with that, let’s continue on with our presentation.

And I’m going to turn this over to Britney, and Britney’s gonna talk to you a little bit about, open enrollment with UKG benefits. Get ready.

Thank you, Sandy.

So while you guys, and I saw eleven percent of you, hate the benefit negotiation part. But while you’re waiting for that to happen, there are things you can do ahead of time to prepare for open enrollment so you’re not just twiddling your thumbs waiting for the execs to make decisions. Right? And while you’re waiting to get those back, you can go ahead and look and ready at your benefit profile assignments, your employee eligibility setting.

Go ahead and take a look at your enrollment window dates, your plan year start date, and the messaging that goes out to employees. Review your benefit plans, coverage tiers, and rates, all of this stuff well before you hear from your broker. You wanna know what it looks like last year, so you’re trying to keep that across the system. Review your employee self-service experience.

Go ahead and go through that again if you can, if you can test that out again. Look at your dependent mobile tab. Watch through your approval workflow questionnaires. Any final approvers.

Make sure your final approvers know that they’re final approvers, and then review your deduction update. So going back through this will help you know where that information goes when you do get it back from your brokers so you’re not looking at this for the first time in a year right when you get that info.

A lot of times as you go through open enrollment, especially as we’re starting it up and finishing it up, you encounter the same kind of issues. We hear questions all the time that are just really repetitive. So a lot of times people will ask us where an open enrollment is, where is it, somebody said they submitted it. Those are often left pending approval, so you wanna make sure that you’re taking that step of approving those.

A lot of times we see people who have updated their benefit profiles but they didn’t assign them to the right employees.

We see people who add contacts as a beneficiary but they forget to add them as a dependent and then when they try to go enroll their kids in a benefit, they’re not listed there.

We see times when people can only see their old rates or their old plans because they have not adjusted those plan years or they also might have not updated the profile there as well.

We see people expect passive enrollment to be enabled, and it’s not. Or they don’t expect it, and it is. You wanna pay attention to your passive enrollment options.

And then we see people in the HR team, especially, who are confused by the employee self-service because they’ve been looking at it from the inside when your employees are asking questions about the actual process. You wanna make sure you go through those so you know what that looks like. As soon as open enrollment happens, enroll yourself so you know how to answer those questions.

A lot of you are here because of the system configuration. You wanna know how it works. You wanna know, what pieces of that pay attention to. In Ready, those top three options, they’re the big configuration stuff. Everything else lives with inside of it. So we start with benefit profiles. Our profile has our plans and our plan details, but those profiles are what go to be assigned to the employee.

Those profiles are, they’re what carry your details. You can assign specific plans to them. You can set the dates for those plans and all of those kind of things. At that point, you build out your plans.

You can build out new plans every year. You can add to a specific plan if your plans are remaining the same for the most part, or you can just start scratch and add a new plan altogether. The plan details that you get each year, that’s where those live. They live inside the plans themselves.

So everything like pricing updates, employee self-service messaging, and the views, and the approval path, all of that lives inside the plan itself. So you wanna pay extra attention once you get to that third layer.

Key dates. Once my colleagues start to talk, you’ll see that other systems in UKG have some pretty hard and fast dates. Ready is a little bit different because it’s made for a different kind of client. So the dates that you work around, those are determined by you and your team.

So you need to make sure that you and your team are all on the same page. You need to know when your plan year starts, when your open enrollment starts and ends. You need to know what it looks like for new hires who are starting right before or right during open enrollment. I was a new hire at Ascend at the beginning of open enrollment, so I had to do my last couple of months of the year and then my next year enrollment at the same time.

So go through that process, make sure it looks right, make sure that you know what what the employees will expect. And then be sure to know your carrier, your payroll date. What is the first payroll date that these deductions hit? What are the dates that my carrier is expecting updates on?

The big piece in the middle here, that’s your testing window. You want that to be as wide as it can be, and you wanna make sure to have that built out as thoroughly as you can. That testing window is what will save you. The more you test, the less questions you have to answer, and the less questions you don’t know the answer to.

When you’re testing, make sure you are going through and trying everything. I always say pick the problem child. They’re the problem child. You know they’re gonna call you with questions.

You know they’re gonna ask you all sorts of things you haven’t thought about. But pretend you are the problem child and go through and walk through that process as if you are doing the most complicated open enrollment you can do. Make sure that you know when that testing window is and that your team is on the same page for when all of these dates are set for.

Alright. So as you start to get into this, make sure that you have your own checklist. This is a high level overview checklist, but I strongly recommend considering back to last year what went wrong, what went well, and make sure that you build this year’s checklist accordingly. If there are issues you had last year, build it in. Make sure you don’t miss that twice.

So these things are stuff that we would look at prelaunch to make sure that everything is done at a higher level. So make sure you finalize your benefits, your rate, your plan, your start date. Make sure you know and have a plan for EDI testing. Don’t get through everything and at the end go, oh my gosh. I have to get this to my carriers. How do I do that? Plan around your EDI testing and timing.

Go through and confirm every single benefit profile plan group tier workflow messaging questionnaires. Make sure that you have physically got your own eyes on those things, and there aren’t surprises down the road. I’ve seen it where I’m not supposed to be able to enroll myself in life insurance or enroll my spouse in life insurance without enrolling myself, and people don’t test that. They don’t try to enroll their spouse without enrolling themselves, and then they have to deal with that and backtrack after open enrollment. Test all of those levels.

Assign a profile to a test employee and walk through it as the employee trying absolutely everything. Be sure to test dependents, plan selections, waived documents, final submission. Make sure you know what that looks like.

And then log in as an approver, not yourself. Log in as a different approver and make sure that you know what they see. So when managers call you and say, hey. I need to know what I’m supposed to do. You know what that looks like from their view, not just from your own.

Every single time you make an update, go retest it again. Make sure you didn’t accidentally break something in the process of fixing something else. That is always a pain when you learn that live, so make sure that you do that extra step, that final check, that final sign off so you don’t have to deal with it.

So we can break that checklist down into three different parts here during, after, and then your first payroll. So during open enrollment, that’s when we get more specific here. We are monitoring who has started open enrollment, who hasn’t, and who needs approval. We do that so we can send out reminders and announcements. UKG Ready has the ability to do pop ups and targeted messaging, and you can use those features to remind people that they need to be doing open enrollment. I do see a lot of folks put open enrollment on their dashboards for a period of time, so it is right in the employee space as soon as they log in. That’s a neat trick that I’ve started to see a lot more recently.

As you go through these, track your questions and issues. Make sure that you are taking these notes. So next year, when you go back and do this first step again, you’re going back through those questions so you don’t have to answer them again next year.

Make sure you’re tracking changes so that you can, test each one of those, and then be sure to confirm your mobile and desktop access. If you are promoting the mobile option to enroll in benefits, then make sure you’ve tested that as well and keep an eye on it to make sure that people aren’t, they’re not encountering issues with that or having a hard time logging in.

After you get through open enrollment and the first part’s done, we’re not quite there yet. We’re not done yet. You still need to go through and approve or reject all outstanding enrollment requests. You need to export and validate that information.

Don’t assume that it’s correct without getting your eyes on the data itself. Go ahead and confirm those carrier EDI fees. Make sure you complete the and that you know what your next step for responsibilities are. And then as always, archive those results.

Make sure that next year is even better because you know what didn’t go well this year.

Once we get through open enrollment, a lot of HR folks are like, whoo, I’m done. Payroll folks on here, no. I am not done. That is not where this ends. Because on your first payroll, you need to compare your benefit deductions so you know the difference in those. If you know you had a thirty percent hike this this time around, then you can compare that to the last pay period and recognize that that hike is there in those benefit deductions. If they shouldn’t be, get those numbers in front of you and make sure if there’s a difference, you know why it’s there.

Go ahead and validate those deduction effective dates and the employer contribution. A lot of people forget about employer contributions and then later on can’t figure out why their vendor payments aren’t right, but pay extra attention to those details.

Your first payroll is your final opportunity to fix stuff before the first live data goes out.

Identify missing, doubled, or old plan deduction. Sometimes if you have to change your deduction between years, then you may encounter old deduction is still active, new deduction is active, and now we’re seeing those double deductions come out. So be sure to pay attention to those kind of details and resolve any variances that you see there before you close the payroll. You all know this. It is a lot easier to fix before you submit payroll. Once you submit it, we are avoiding pay statements. We are doing payroll adjustments and all sorts of things that are just easier to fix before you click that submit button.

There are a lot of reports built into the system to make this easier for you. The recommended reports that we have are the benefit open enrollment status report.

That allows you to go in and see open enrollment that have not started, those that are in progress, and those that have been submitted so that you can build targeted reminders around them. You can see enrollment request or change request summary.

That kinda shows you the difference in what people had before and what they have now so that things make sense. If I have an employee who used to have five kids on his plan and had a whole lot of everything and now all of a sudden he’s backed out, maybe I wanna have a conversation with him. Is this something he needs? Is there, you know, is there confusion? Did he not know what he signed up for? Was it an accident? Make sure you take the opportunity to fix those things and to build relationships with the employees in the process.

Your employee benefit plans report, that allows you to map end date updates. So it gives you an overview of what those end dates are and lets you get a glance at them. But, also, if there are corrections that need to be made, you can do it from that employee benefit plans report.

And then your carrier EDI validation extract. You wanna make sure you get eyes on it, you wanna make sure that the people on your team who work with EDI fees, that that’s not you, that they know what their next steps are, and that you have validated those reports before that first pay run.

So for me personally, when I do the high high level checklist, I start before open enrollment. And I’m starting with that because I’m getting familiar with what my plans look like now. I wanna know when my employees call me and say, hey. What happened to our vision plan?

Why is it twice as expensive now? I wanna know that. I don’t want that to be a surprise to me when somebody calls. So get your eyes on those plans, get your eyes on the configuration, and know what needs to be changed.

Then we’re gonna launch your open enrollment. That is when you go through the whole testing profiles, plans, rates are all updated and tested.

And you know who’s responsible for what in each of those steps. If you have multiple people on your team who are handling this together, make sure that your support ownership is assigned specifically.

Throughout open enrollment, review daily. Review the statuses, approval issues, and make sure that you have, employee reminders going out when they need to.

Once your open enrollment is done, you’re gonna close it all out. You’re going to approve all of your requests or reject them if necessary. That doesn’t happen a whole lot, but it could. You are going to log exceptions and make sure that you have a, a list of things that might have gone wrong.

And then on your first payroll, that is the true last step. Again, we’re not done when open enrollment is done. Make sure that you partner with your payroll team so that you can assist if needed. If they have updates that need to be done, you’re working with them. So you are doing deduction audit, variances, resolving those, and you are tracking that with the responsible parties that you’ve signed earlier in the process.

Thanks so much, Britney. And with that, we’re gonna turn it over to our next expert on the panel, and that is Morgan Maris. Morgan, take it away.

Thanks, Sandy, and thank you, Britney.

Alright. So when we’re going through our open enrollment in classic benefits, the first thing that we really wanna make sure that we’re identifying is whether or not we’re having a passive or active open enrollment. Are we changing vendors? Are we gonna require employees to log in and everyone makes a change, or are we just gonna kind of let last year’s elections roll forward?

We wanna also make sure that we’re taking any necessary trainings and learning about session configuration, business rules configuration, things like that so that, you know, the process is a little bit easier to get through, and you can answer any questions as they come up.

Additionally, we need to look through any new custom requests, any people analytics BI reports that maybe you guys thought were not helpful last year or something that might make it easier on you this year, identifying what some of those needs are.

Reviewing our deduction benefit plan codes and vendor rates. I know sometimes, you know, vendors can take a while to get us the updates that are needed for open enrollment, but just familiarizing yourself once again to make sure that all of those setups are correct and maybe kind of tracking what some updates that you need to ask your vendors about for are.

Going through standard reports that are available for monitoring elections, just making sure you’re familiar with those so that, you know, when you’re in open enrollment, you can be monitoring what your employees are electing. And then managing employee communications. That’s always something that kind of happens later on in the process, and at the end of it, you’re like, oh my gosh. I forgot to send out an email to my employees. So before we’re getting open enrollment kind of started in this hundred and twenty day window prior to the beginning of twenty twenty seven, which is crazy to say, just making sure that you have that communication set for your employees.

Some common things that we see, you know, again, as I mentioned earlier, vendors can take a long time to get us our our new rates, any updates, any, you know, cheat sheets that you might need for open enrollment.

And just kind of making sure that you’re staying on top of that and waiting, but familiarizing yourself with the system.

UKG has a deadline of August first, and I know we’re already past that for submitting service request for any new vendor integrations that you might need as well as making any updates to current files. Here at Ascend, we can actually take those, new integration requests up to, October first, and any changes to existing files, we can take up to November first. So you have a little bit of time there, but that’s something that we see every year is, oh my gosh. I have all these new plans, and I, don’t have time to get an integration built.

Any employees that might need to log in or guest employees. So sometimes your broker wants to go in and and help configure stuff, look around, make sure that you have the right documentation. So making sure their access is set up correctly.

Another thing that we see is when we’re going to be sending our open enrollment file, we have to turn off our our existing integrations so they don’t overwrite and making sure that everybody knows how to run those on demand open enrollment files.

And then just again, the the employee communications are always kind of the last step that everybody, you know, panics about at the very end, and oh my gosh, I need to make sure that this is all drafted and ready to go. So making sure that that’s taken care of ahead of time is always super helpful.

So some critical steps and key areas to focus on. So the first thing you want to determine is your session open close dates, when are your employees going to be going in and logging in and making those new elections.

The pending effective date worksheet is a a worksheet that UKG provides to help you determine the appropriate dates to use in the system. I’m sure everyone has kind of, in working with the system, figured out that Pro is very date driven. It’s very, very sensitive to the effective dates that are used. So that pending effective date worksheet will help you determine what range that you need to use for your updating of your rates and your pending effective date for the first payroll of the year. This is kind of like the bible of open enrollment for pro and or for core benefits, and you really wanna make sure that you have that on hand, and we will be providing that with this presentation so that you guys have it.

Also, we wanna make sure that you are making sure your access rights are are set up for your team to go in and make any changes, add, delete, view, that sort of thing for open enrollment and life events.

We wanna confirm our dependent relationships, our benefit options. Do we allow stepchildren to enroll in the plans? Do we allow domestic partners? All those those sorts of things. We also wanna verify our deduction benefit types.

The benefit types in pro are set, so we cannot add any additional benefit types. So making sure that there’s, you know, updates to the descriptions if we’re gonna be using different plan types to kind of make up for some of those things, like if you need to break out your critical illness plans, etcetera.

And then any EOI rates and goal amounts, making sure that those align with the pending effective date that is determined in the pending effective date estimator. And then when you’re building your sessions, we wanna make sure that you have identified, you know, where everybody fits in the mix, that everyone’s in the right deduction groups, and that the correct start and stop dates are set with the qualifiers.

So some key dates that we want you guys to be mindful of. Obviously, we’re in this four months before OE, kind of the beginning of the year. So we’re gonna be strategizing, of starting those conversations with our vendors.

Three months before, so coming up here at the beginning of September, again, we wanna be talking about service requests, getting those, mid year, you know, maybe any plan changes into UKG so that you are in set up for the success the beginning of the year.

August first, so that, you know, date has obviously already passed, but we wanna get our exports kind of all set in stone and make sure that, you know, we’re getting those file feeds in production before the end of the year. And then a couple of weeks before open enrollment starts, it’s test, test, test. So we wanna finalize testing, go through deduction goal amounts, and all of your open enrollment communications. I always say when you’re testing those, those those, elections, use all of your all of your different employees, different departments, test anyone in all of your different deduction benefit groups. Like Brittany mentioned, there’s always that one employee, so, make sure you use them as a test, use yourself as a test, and really just make sure that nothing is going to surprise you or your employees in that employee experience.

Alright. So here’s just a little checklist that we’re gonna kinda go through before you launch your open enrollment. So it’s always important for your employees to go in and update their personal and contact information, especially before the end of the year for things like, you know, getting new vendor cards, things like that, as well as, you know, jumping ahead a little bit, but year end in w two. So, making sure that their contacts and dependents are updated, that sort of a thing. In open enrollment, when you are testing, one of the, like, key little points I like to to shout out is if you’re testing and you wanna test adding a dependent or beneficiary and you do that in test before you resetting your elections or at all, the contact will be live on the employee’s profile. So you can look at the screen. I just don’t recommend adding a contact or dependent to one of your employees because they they will stay there, and that will obviously raise a question.

You wanna finalize all your open enrollment communications, confirm that the employees that are gonna be logging in outside of maybe some of your internal or on-site computers have the compatibility guide so they know that their browsers are compatible.

We will also include that in the session. So if you guys don’t have that and have not been in the community or seen it, you will have that.

We wanna reset all of your elections. So you can go in there and test as much as you’d like, but, before you make the session live, we really wanna make sure that you’re resetting those elections so that employees don’t see, like, who is in here and why is my open enrollment already showing in progress.

And then ensure that your ad change contacts business process is active for admins and employees so that when people are making changes, it’s going through the correct approval process and routing accordingly.

And before I switch to your next slide, for those on the call, my colleague has been putting in the chat the links to all of those items that, Morgan just mentioned.

Thanks, Sandy.

Okay. So going through the checklist during post and first payroll of the year. So during open enrollment, we wanna make sure that we’re turning our sessions to live and confirming that enrollment is beginning as scheduled. If you move your session from test to live prior to that, start date, then when the employees come in the fir that first day, it’s gonna be live.

I think it’s somewhere between midnight and two AM that that day. So if you forget, no worries. The The second that you switch it to live, it’s gonna look at that date of the session opening and be available to your employees. You are able to employ email your employees throughout the session and, you know, remind them, hey.

You’re in progress. I see you haven’t finished your elections. Did you have any questions? That sort of thing.

And you’ll able to run election reports to kind of monitor these new elections as they happen.

You’ll also wanna coordinate life events with open enrollment to avoid conflicting elections with the pending effective date. It’s always dicey at the end of the year when you’ve got new hires maybe in November or December, and they’re enrolling in, you know, the last couple of months of benefits and then, you know, making sure that they understand the difference between what they’re electing for this year and what they’re going to be electing for next year.

After open enrollment closes, we’re gonna run any deduction stop dates for FSA and any obsolete plans that you’re not using after the last payroll of this year following into next year.

We wanna stop any benefit plans that are ending any deduction cut or dependent coverage. There’s a web import tool for that.

We wanna stop any regular custom inter interface feeds so that, again, as I mentioned earlier, nothing overwrites each other. So we’re gonna stop our weekly files. We’re gonna stop our, you know, mid session files and make sure that the vendors are ready to receive our open enrollment elections. And then again, if you if you can run all those reports, make sure you’re saving all of those records of your final elections for reference. There’s always gonna be employees that come back and ask or are you know, I didn’t mean to enroll in this, that, and the other. So having that information at your fingertips to answer those questions is really helpful.

And then your first payroll of the year, we’re gonna verify the new rates came in correctly.

Make sure all of your terminated benefits are stopped and not duplicating deductions, and your, you know, new coverage amounts are pulling through.

We’re gonna wanna make sure that we get that confirmation from our vendors that the exports were sent appropriately and everybody is kind of updated in their system as well, and then resolve any issues that, might come up because of election conflicts before the pending effective date.

I do recommend if you do have the bandwidth to start your payroll your first payroll of the year a little early, that really helps kind of catch all of these things and ensure that, you know, you’re not processing payroll and then something’s not right and you have to go back and make corrections to the employee’s checks.

And lastly, for my my side of the presentation, we’re going to talk through some reports. So the recommended reports that we have here are the all open enrollment elections report. This is going to actually show all of your dependents on a separate line. It’s really helpful to kind of just see what everybody’s elected, how many dependents you have, if somebody’s elected, you know, life insurance coverage for their spouse and not themselves, those sort of things.

The side by side open enrollment versus current elections is super helpful because, especially with passive open enrollment, you can kinda go in there and see, okay, what did my employee have last year versus what they elected this year or what’s gonna be rolling forward.

Employees by deduction benefit group, that’s always a great way to audit. So run that and you can see, you know, what each different benefit group that might have different offerings and who selected what. The linked plans deduction setup report. So as I mentioned, before, in case anybody, you know, has those life insurance policies that say you have to have employee election to have spouse or child, we can link those, and we can put a contingency on those plans, but this report will definitely help you identify that.

And then the WIT dependent benefit plan listing, it’ll identify dependents that might need stop dates, maybe anybody that’s aged out or anybody that’s moving off of plans that doesn’t get stopped.

And then some key resources there, I think that we’ve been putting some of, these items in the chat, but the pending effective date estimator, that’s gonna be the biggest thing. If you guys take away anything from this presentation, please, please, please take away the pending effective date worksheet. This will help you tremendously.

There’s lots of training in the Ulta University.

So there’s lots of courses out there in the community you can take to familiarize yourself with configuration and setup and just the kind of common gotchas.

Make sure you’re managing those service requests and any cases that you set in for new interfaces, things like that, any reporting needs, and then that compatibility browser guide to make sure that, you know, any of the employees that are going in or even yourself at the organization are not gonna run into any browser errors.

And with that, I will turn it over to Jen.

Thanks, Morgan. Jumping into benefits administration.

We know open enrollment is rapidly approaching. We’re heading into September already, which is crazy. So we want to be proactive as we head into our open enrollment season. So some key things that we can start to do now to prepare and be proactive as we prepare for open enrollment, reviewing employee independent data. In benefits administration, our benefits eligibility is based on qualifiers. Your qualifiers could be payroll schedule, employment level, employee type, location code. We wanna make sure all of your employees are coded properly so they are going to be in the correct benefit eligibility groups.

Also, reviewing your eligibility groups as well. Do you have a new benefit plan where you’re offering, a benefit to maybe executives? Maybe you just added a union, we need to build out separate union plans. So we’re gonna review your employee data, making sure they’re falling into the correct eligibility rules.

Your plan and rate configuration. At this point, you’ve been working with your vendor trying to determine if you’re going to add any new vendors or add any new plans or if you’re gonna keep all of your existing plans and vendors the same.

Working through system and page content. Again, if we’re adding new vendors or new benefit pages, then we will update our plan content.

Updating rates as well, typically each year. Rates can either increase or decrease. We’ll kind of review that and make sure that we have a game plan to get that prepared.

Carrier updates. If you’re offering a new vendor, that would be a new file feed. If you’re offering a new plan or making changes, like you’re adding a new location or department, that would just be a update to an existing file feed.

Testing and validation. This is extremely important that we really come up with a game plan on testing and validating the data before OE is launched just to make sure that employees don’t have any kind of issues.

And lastly, reviewing new hires and open enrollment. So a lot of employers at this time are still hiring employees through October, November, and December.

In benefits administration, they will have, depending on your new hire roles, they would have a new hire window and an open enrollment window. So we just wanna make sure we come up with a game plan to communicate that to those employees so they kind of know what’s expected of them as they walk through a new hire window to either elect or, decline benefits and then also go through the OE window for next year.

And as much as we can prepare, sometimes there are some gotchas or maybe mistakes that we had made. So, hopefully, this will kind of prepare you, to keep an eye on those things.

So enrollment request left in pending approval. This could be your document request or many or, EOIs. We wanna make sure we review those before we open up open enrollment. So that way, employees don’t have issues as they’re going through their open enrollment window.

Benefit profiles updated, not assigned to the right employees. That kind of ties back to your employee or dependent data in your eligibility roles.

Dependents visible on employee records, but not attached plans.

Old plans or rates not, ended, and they’re still carrying over into the new plan year. This is especially important as benefit salary. If you are using benefit salary for any of your benefit plans, whether it is life, ADD, disability, anything like that, we have to make sure we import that for the new plan year. Benefit salary does not roll over year to year. We will have to import that, or we can just update an employee’s record with the benefit salary.

And lastly, not reviewing the employee self-service or the mobile window. What we don’t want to happen is having OE launch and having a lot of employees come to us and saying they can’t get into the window or it’s not working on their mobile version for whatever reasons. We wanna make sure as we are going through testing that we review and verify all of that. And we could also send out communication just saying, hey. If you’re going through a a web browser, make sure you’re using Google Chrome. If you’re on your phone, make sure your phone is updated to the latest, version. So those are just some catches and mistakes that we want to make sure we review, as we’re preparing for open enrollment.

K. Some key configuration areas and critical steps. So as we go through open enrollment and benefits administration, everything is done through what we call the GRT or the guided renewal tool. So within the GRT, we’re able to create what we call our plan year as our first step, your profile assignments.

So if your plan year is maybe ten one, eleven one, twelve one for your regular benefits, that would be one profile assignment. However, if you’re offering any kind of FSA, HSA, or commuter plans and those have to run on a one one plan year, that would be a separate plan year. So we would create two separate plan years. But if all of your benefits are running on a one one plan year, that would just be one profile assignment.

We would also determine if your benefits are going to be active versus passive. You can have everything active. You can have some benefits active and some benefits passive.

Your OE dates and windows, this is, again, especially important because this is what we’re commuting to our communicating to our employees so they know when is it’s expected of them to go in and elect benefits. Maybe they want to go home and discuss it with their families and review and just kind of determine what makes sense for their family and when would be the lattice lace late latest day they can make of those elections.

And, importantly, syncing payroll calendars. This is important because your payroll calendars have to be created in pro, and then we can sync them into Benadmin. This, ties back to your deductions. So you can have employees that are paid weekly, biweekly, semimonthly. We enter rates in as a monthly rate, and then the system will look at their payroll calendar and determine how often deductions should be taken out. So we wanna make sure as far as timing that we get that piece done in pro so we can sync them appropriately in Benadmin.

Your benefit groups and plans.

We want to make sure that we have all of your correct eligibility groups there, and each each eligibility group is showing the correct benefit plans. K? So if you have union and nonunion, we don’t want a union employee seeing nonunion benefits. Right? So we wanna make sure that we clone, your employees and make sure we’re walking through each of your eligibility groups and making sure they can see appropriately what they should.

The plan designer, this is where we go through and build out your new benefit vendors, new plans, or maybe we’re just updating plans. That’s okay. That is all done through the plan designer. We wanna make sure that your plans are all attached to the correct, vendor. All of their rates are updated for the new plan year. Again, pricing updates, we have to enter rates in monthly, and the system will calculate out their per pay.

The employee view, employee instructions. This is a good time to go through and create employee guides, kind of giving them a step by step. Here’s where you start. Here’s where you elect your benefits. Here’s where you can download different documentation like SDCs, plan flyers, that sort of thing.

And then, ultimately, payroll timing. So we will have to go through, the pending effective date worksheet, and we’ll have to create a timeline on when we can, end date some benefits that are ending in twenty twenty six in pro so we can send over new deductions before your first payroll of the new year.

Some key dates and and deadlines. So about twelve to fourteen weeks before OE, so now we’re starting to prepare for that at this point, is submitting service requests for your files. So, again, if you have a new vendor, we would need to create a new file feed. If you’re offering new benefit plans or even making changes to those plans, again, adding a new location, department, that sort of thing, we still have to submit a service request because we wanna make sure we update that existing file feed to pick up that new information.

The guided renewal tool. So I’ve talked about this a couple of times. This is where your open enrollment configuration is going to be housed, where your testing is going to be. The GRT is available to you within your Benadmin homepage a hundred and twenty days before your plan year. So if your plan year is on a one one schedule, a hundred and twenty days before that would be Thursday, September third. So by Thursday, September third, the GRT will be open in BEN admin, and that will allow you to go in and start to configure open enrollment, creating your new plan year, creating your new benefits, creating new benefit plans, updating rates, and then we’ll go through testing through, the GRT as well.

By Tuesday, December first is when we wanna make sure that we, have every file feed that needs to be updated entered. If we don’t have these service requests entered on time, we can come up with a contingency trigger. But, ultimately, if your files are not going to be ready, we would work with your vendor and UKG to determine a interim process, which would be really running some benefit reports to make sure your vendors are still getting the open enrollment, information.

So our go live checklist, this is prelaunch. Again, this is going to be all within the GRT. So our GRT is essentially our checklist. We check off every step of the way in the GRT when things are completed until it’s finally done.

Once the GRT is completed, it has to be done before OE is opened. K? So this is, again, all prelaunch. This is where we’re building your benefit plans, rates.

This is where we’re setting up your plan year. This is where we’re, putting in our request for EDI files. This is where we’re testing. It’s really important we pick employees out of each eligibility group and clone their profile, and then we walk through the entire open enrollment window as they would see it.

Anything that we see, if rates are incorrect, if a coverage tier is missing, if PDFs are not working, we essentially step out of that, go in and make our corrections, and then we’ll have you retest thoroughly until there are no issues. K? We want to make this a successful open enrollment, so kind of really verifying and testing everything is correct before open enrollment really kind of minimizes any issues during open enrollment. We test adding in dependents.

We test enrolling in plans, declining plans, any kind of FSA, HSA commuter plan. We want to elect the maximum, that we can to make sure that the system is not allowing us to go over either our, monthly maximum or our annual maximum. K?

And then we reset everything. And once we confirm that we are comfortable with how OE looks, then we can launch through the GRT or open enrollment.

So that was pre open enrollment. Now what we’re gonna do during OE, post OE, or during our first payroll. So as OE is opened, typically, OE runs, you know, anywhere from two to three weeks or, you know, more or less. So during your OE window, we can run a couple of different reports including our not started report or in progress report. These are especially important because it’s the goal for any kind of open enrollment to have a one hundred percent completion. Right? So we’re able to run these reports and see who has not started or who has maybe opened it but has not completed their window.

That way, we can reach out to those employees or even their managers to make sure that they understand that they have to elect benefits or else they’re not gonna have benefits for twenty twenty seven.

We can send reminders or announcements again through, benefits administration. So, again, kind of sending out a a blast message to all, making sure, hey. Open enrollment. You have one week left. Make sure you get your elections in.

We would have an actions and issues logs. We can track any kind of issues or errors that came up. So that way next year, we can kind of work through those and make sure that that doesn’t occur again.

And lastly, really just, again, confirming the mobile and desktop remains usable. We don’t want employees, you know, on the start day of OE getting in and everyone having issues and having to delay OE. So we wanna really make sure, again, we’re being proactive, and we’re testing all of that before OE. Now post OE, reviewing and, either approving or rejecting documents or EOIs. We don’t wanna delay any kind of employee deduction because, again, we wanna make sure it’s deducted with the first payroll. So we wanna make sure we get all of those up reviewed and approved or rejected so no issues with payroll.

Exporting and validating completed elections. So this way, we can run benefit reports out of the system and making sure everyone’s elections are correct. They’re not enrolled in something they shouldn’t have. Or maybe if you’re offering an HSA, they have to be enrolled in a high deductible. We wanna review and verify that anyone that has an HSA also has a high deductible.

Confirming carrier or EDI files. So this is especially important because a lot of times, your vendors will say, hey. I need the open enrollment file by December fifth to send ID cards out by one one. So we wanna work through each of your files and making sure the timing with UKG and your vendor when those files are going to be sent so ID cards are sent timely.

And then archiving, request or document exceptions. Again, that kind of ties back to the document request, EOIs, making sure that those are approved or rejected timely.

And then as we prepare for our first payroll, what we want to do is run the pending effective date worksheet. So that way, we can understand your deduction start and stop dates. We’ll have to run what we call the wit tool. We wanna stop any benefits that are ending, or any coverages that are ending for twenty twenty six. So that way, we can push over the deductions for twenty twenty seven.

We can also identify any kind of missing deductions. So if medical and dental had all gone over but not vision, we would inspect that and kind of review and understand why. And then resolving any kind of variances before payroll opens is ultimately the main goal because we want you to have a successful first payroll of the plan there. So it’s really kind of just including in our time time to audit and review and make sure that all of your deductions and earnings look okay.

And lastly, these are just some really recommended reports and resources that I would keep on hand as you’re preparing to go into OE. So some of the recommended reports that I had mentioned, the first one, the not started incomplete or completed enrollment reports. Those are three separate reports. I would absolutely run those, just again so you can kind of see who has maybe not started or has an incomplete enrollment. That way, we can communicate to those employees the importance of electing benefits or they won’t have benefits for the new plan year. Also coming up with a game plan for those employees that are going to be on a leave of absence that we make sure that we have a game plan on how we can get their enrollments because they are on a leave.

The abandoned shopping cart report, again, that’s gonna be the same. That’s going to be those employees that have maybe started but have not completed their open enrollment.

The validation report, this is especially important because we wanna make sure that the system is working as intended with the rules that we have in place.

Again, with the validation report, some common things that can come up, maybe you’re trying to enroll a dependent that’s over the age of twenty six and the system is kicking them out. Another big example is if you have two employees that both work for you and they’re both trying to cover the same dependent, the system is going to error that out. So we really wanna make sure we run that and review all of their discrepancies before your first payroll. And lastly, the overage dependent report. So that way we know kind of who is coming up on, becoming age twenty six as their benefits are going to be, terminated. And then, again, just some key UKG resources, the GRT, some of those deadlines, EDIs, payment services, and then the carrier integration, lead times. So I hope you found this, informational, and I will turn it over back to Sandy and Jenny.

Thank you so much to Morgan, Britney, and Jen for your expertise. Thank you. Thank you very much for for for everybody attending the webinar and and relaying that information to them. Jenny, can you share a little bit just to the group in case they do need assistance beyond what we’ve just presented, what we could do for them?

Absolutely. Thank you, Sandy. So aside from what everybody covered, and thank you so much, we can also provide guidance on you know, guidance and best practices, help you establish timelines if it’s just configuration assistance you’re looking for or help, you know, establishing some test scenarios. We can help with recommendations and creations. We can also help with carrier inter interfaces.

Pardon me. But that’s for pro only. I just need to be declaring that we can’t do benadmin or ready on that. And we can also work with you and your team on training and knowledge transfer and creating some user guides if needed.

And we can do all of this. We can do one, a couple. It’s entirely up to you. And if that’s something you’re interested in, you can just reach out to me, and I can talk to you more about it, and we can work on a plan.

Yeah. And and we do have an entire training and enablement team there to help you as well along with the user guides that that Jenny could talk to you on a one on one basis as well.

And for those who do reach out to me, we we’ll have a conversation. You just need to let me know that you did attend the webinar, and we can talk about a discount on that.

And if I may, there was one question in the q and a about the GRT versus delivery hub. And, Jen, may I call on you on that?

Yes. So right now, the delivery hub is currently being used by UKG partners and has not been rolled out to, official partners, like ourselves at this point. So for myself, I’ll be going through the GRT. However, if you have a UKG led open enrollment, there are high chances that it will be through the delivery hub. It just hasn’t been officially rolled out to everyone just yet.

And there was one other question. I don’t know if you responded to it since I’ve got two minutes.

Someone had opened up the GRT, and now it’s completely gone.

Yeah. I was just asking when their when their plan year was, because that would not be normal. Like, I can see the GRT on the window, but I’m not able to do anything in it. So I’m just trying to get some additional information on that.

Thank you, Jen. I appreciate it. Any any other questions in the two minutes that we have remaining?

Melissa, was there a common theme of any of the questions that we could throw out to the team real quick in our limited time?

I don’t know that I would say a common theme that but there were a lot of questions about reporting. So, across all three platforms, Sandy.

Great. So if I had to choose one, that would what would be what it is.

Okay. So with that, I I know we ran out of time for everybody attending today to hit your questions in this q and a. We’re gonna do this.

We’ll end today’s webinar. We’ll for those of you who want to stay on and have our experts kind of answer a question to you live or to go through this, we’ll stay on a few more minutes and answer those. Otherwise, I want to just say again thank you to the presenters and my team for putting this together and to sharing this information to our UKG community, and thank you to everybody who attended today. Here is Jenny’s contact information if you wanna reach out to her directly.

Again, the recording, the slide deck, the links, and an FAQ will be sent out to you sometime next week as a follow-up, so that you have all of that information available to you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day and, a wonderful time going into the weekend. We appreciate you.

Have a wonderful day.

Everyone. Bye bye.

Thank you.