Employee benefits aren't "bleeding" your organization financially alone, but they are taking away precious productive time, from you or your employees, trying to manage enrollment, reconcile invoices (remember there is a time limit, usually 60 days, to contact your insurance carrier and correct an overpayment, after that the carrier picked up the extra income), administer cobra services for departing employees and everything else that goes with it...

The best solution, I believe is to either get a software based solution that helps with the automation process of benefits administration, or outright outsource the administration to professional, the second option can be an expensive one, but once a business grows and you have a dedicated person managing benefits, and maybe a part timer added to the team during the enrollment period, the costs become relative, it might even be a cost savings solution.

The cheaper solution, is through one of the usual suspect large payroll providers, they all, one way or another tackle the issue of Benefit administration, usually through an HR/benefit administration piece attached to their payroll services, the beauty of these solutions is that it is all integrated, so when you hire a new employee, once you enter the data into the payroll application, the HR and benefit applications are populated as well, and some solutions will actually offer you to automate your organization's health insurance policies and automatically set time delays to when benefits begin.

Some of these solutions, feed right into your carrier's website, and invoices are pulled into the system and automatically reconciled with your HR/payroll records. Also some of these solutions offer the ability for your employees to enroll or change their enrollment on line without having to fill out paperwork. These solutions, will also relieve the workload of your HR department so that they can concentrate on activities which bare a higher business impact to the organization.

Learn more about this author, Michael Di Corcia.
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