Benefit Plans
How do I add benefit plans in BambooHR?
Purpose: To help you understand how to add and set up benefit plans your company offers to your employees.
Did you know BambooHR offers a benefits administration add-on? With BambooHR® Benefits Administration, you can set up open enrollment windows for your employees to select which plans they want to enroll in. You can then approve the enrollments and export the enrollment data to send to your carriers. Click here to learn more!
Do you prefer hands-on learning? Our interactive guides will show you different aspects of your BambooHR experience. We have an interactive guide specifically designed to show you how to start adding your benefit plans. You can use the link below to access this guide. All you need to do is modify the "REPLACEME" with your BambooHR subdomain, and you can get started!
https://REPLACEME.bamboohr.com/home?pendo=6tUgG8lrkM0T9lu6RLVRmh6rznY
Add a benefit plan
If you are using BambooHR® Benefits Administration or BambooHR® Payroll, you may notice a few changes in the plan setup. Review the following help guides to learn more about the changes.
Benefit plans include benefits your company offers to your employees. Depending on the benefit type, you can determine eligibility rules, coverage options (if applicable), and payment amounts in the benefit plan setup. Click +Create New Plan to select the benefit type you would like to create a benefit plan for.
The benefit type you select will determine which options appear in the benefit plan setup. The example above is what you will see when adding a medical plan. The same applies to dental, vision, and supplemental plans.
- Plan Name: Type the name of the benefit plan. Each plan needs an unique name, meaning you cannot use the same name across multiple plans, including existing and deleted benefit plans. This helps you tell the different plans shown in the Benefit History table on the employee profile. You can adjust the plan name to create the plan, and a common adjustment is adding the effective year to the plan name (e.g., Medical Plan 2022).
- Description: This is a free text field, where you can add a description about the plan.
- Plan URL: You can add an URL that directs the employee to a plan website for more information.
- Plan Starts & Plan Ends: Those two fields refer to when the plan coverage begins and when it expires. Once you finalize the plan's settings, the start date will not be editable since deductions may have started already.
- Rate: Determine if the benefit plan is a standard rate plan or a variable rate plan. Some benefit types will not show a cost setup in Step 3 (Eligibility and Cost) as the employee's coverage selection will determine costs. If there is at least one employee enrolled in the benefit plan, the rate will not be editable.
- ACA Compliance: This section refers to the minimum value and minimum essential requirements set by the U.S. government. It will only appear for health plans that have ACA tracking enabled. Click on the question mark icon to learn more.
After setting up plan details, click Next: Coverage Options.
The second step is choosing coverage options that apply to the benefit plan.
Only specific benefit types will have additional coverage options, and those types are Medical, Dental, Vision, and Supplemental Health. Other benefit types only apply to the employee level. When needed, you can identify coverage within the plan name under those benefit types (e.g., Employee Life Insurance, Spouse Life Insurance, etc.)
Custom coverages are plan-specific. To create a custom coverage option, click + Add a new coverage option. The custom coverage option will only appear for that benefit plan, not any other benefit plans.
After determining coverage options, click Next: Eligibility and Cost.
In this step, you can add employee eligibility groups and cost information for the benefit plan.
- Which employees are eligible?: Select the employment statuses in which employees are eligible for the benefit plan. You can add additional filters, such as department, division, location, and pay type. If choosing Specific people, additional filters will not apply. Instead, you can specify which employees are eligible for the plan.
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When do new employees become eligible?: Determine when employees will become eligible for the benefit plan. This section includes the following options:
- When it is marked manually: This setting requires you to manually update the employee's eligibility for the benefit plan.
- Immediately upon hire: The employee will be eligible for the benefit plan as of their hire date.
- After a waiting period: The employee will become eligible for the benefit plan immediately after the defined waiting period. You can set the waiting period to a specific number of days, weeks, months, or years after the employee's hire date.
- First of the month following a waiting period: The employee will become eligible for the benefit plan on the first of the month following the defined waiting period.
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When do terminated employees lose eligibility?: This setting is based on the employee's Employment Status field. From the following options, determine when a terminated employee should no longer be eligible for plan coverage.
- On a manually entered date: The system will not set a coverage termination date. The employee will remain enrolled in the benefit plan until you indicate a coverage termination date on their employee profile.
- Day following termination: The system will automatically set the coverage termination date to one day after the enrolled employee's termination date.
- First of the month following termination: The system will automatically set the coverage termination date to the first of the month following the enrolled employee's termination date.
- How much will they pay?: Add the total monthly cost and the employee monthly cost for each coverage option. Once entered, the system will calculate the company monthly cost. In the Employee Pays column, you can add a dollar amount ($) or percentage (%) of the total monthly cost. If you need to change the currency, simply click USD next to the total cost, and the system will update the currency for all coverage options. Each benefit plan can only have one currency.
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Additional eligibility groups: If you need to add another eligibility group with different time to eligibility rules or different Employee Pays/Company Pays amounts, click +Add Eligibility Group. The total cost will remain the same for all groups in a benefit plan.
- Groups are mutually exclusive, meaning that Group B needs to have the same filter criteria as Group A. The only exception to this rule is if Group B has the same filters as Group A but is even more specific with additional filters.
Click Next: Payroll Deduction after filling out eligibility and cost information.
For variable rate plans, costs may vary for each employee based on age or another factor. You can add those costs individually on the employee profile or by using the bulk enrollment feature.
Determine if the benefit deduction happens every paycheck. Deductions commonly happen every paycheck, but you can change the deduction frequency based on the pay schedules you have set up in your company account.*
Once you verify the deduction frequency, click Finish & Save Plan.
*Once a deduction is approved in payroll for a specific benefit plan, Payroll Deduction fields will no longer be editable for that plan in the benefit plan settings. If you need to change how often the benefit deduction should occur, you will need to enter an end date for the current plan and create a new plan with the change as this action will preserve historical data.
BambooHR does not collect and remit payments for third-party vendors for any benefit plans.
Check out this table to learn more about what information you will need to set up each of your plans.
The above screenshot is an example of what you will see when adding a health savings plan (HSA). The setup is simpler and only requires a few details, and it is identical for retirement, flex savings account (FSA), life insurance, disability, and Other benefit plans.
These plans show the employee a set contribution amount (variable or set per employee) based on their pay frequency. You will need to add contribution amounts when you enroll an employee in a benefit plan. For example, I contribute $300 per pay period (bi-weekly, semi-monthly, etc.) to my health savings plan.
The above screenshot is the setup for reimbursement plans. The process of setting this up is slightly different from the other benefit types as this benefit type requires a specific amount associated with the reimbursement.
Reimbursement plans show the employee a specific frequency of the total amount reimbursed to the employee. For example, a car stipend is $500 per month.
Edit or delete a benefit plan
Click on the benefit plan name to make edits.
Once viewing plan details, you can edit most of the information shown in this step. Here are a few things to keep in mind when editing a plan:
- After setting a plan start date (during the initial setup), you cannot change the start date because deductions may have started already.
- To update the monthly cost, navigate to the Eligibility and Cost step.
- You can add more coverage levels under the Coverage Options step, but they will require a monthly cost. Go to the Eligibility and Cost step to add the total monthly cost and Employee Pays/Company Pays cost breakdown.
- Be sure to save the plan once you have completed all edits.
Notes about Eligibility Groups
- After you add a benefit plan, you cannot remove employees from eligibility groups. You can only make additional employees eligible.
- Example: If you have chosen to include employees with the employment status of Full-Time in an eligibility group, you will not be able to remove full-time employees from that group. Your only option is to add additional employment statuses to the eligibility group instead of removing them.
- If you create an eligibility group based on employment status, you cannot delete that eligibility group at a later time. Instead, you will need to duplicate the benefit plan in order to create your new eligibility groups and then move employees over to the new plan.
- If you select specific people (filter) to include in an eligibility group, you will have the option to add or remove eligible employees. You can delete the eligibility group as long as it is not the first and only eligibility group included in the plan.
Extending an existing benefit plan versus creating a new benefit plan is ultimately up to you and how your benefit plans work with your benefit provider. However, it is best practice in BambooHR to create a new benefit plan if you are updating employee and/or company costs. If you are not updating costs, you can, most likely, extend the plan's end date. The table below will give you an overview of what each update will affect.
| How It Affects —> | Enrollment | Benefit History |
|---|---|---|
| Extending an existing plan | Employee enrollments will stay the same. | This update will not add a new history line to the Benefit History table for employees. |
| Creating a new plan | You will need to re-enroll all employees manually or through the bulk enrollment feature. | This update will add a new history line to the Benefit History table for employees. |
To delete a benefit plan, hover over the plan name and click on the trash icon that appears on the far right. A modal will display for you to confirm the deletion of the plan. Type Delete then click the Yes, Delete Plan button to remove it entirely. Deleting benefit plans will remove the ability to manage the associated deduction, and the system will automatically remove (un-enroll) employees from the plan.
If you are using BambooHR® Payroll, you cannot delete benefit plans that have enrollment history. Instead, you can update the end date in the benefit plan settings to deactivate the plan. Click here to learn more.
Expiring benefit plans
The Account Owner, Full Admin users, and any custom access level users with access to Benefits will receive an email notification 30 days and ten days at 12:01 AM (company timezone) before the benefit plan's end date. You can extend the end date in Settings > Benefits > Plans. If you do not extend the end date, the plan will become inactive and unenroll all employees.
To see expired benefit plans, change the view to show inactive plans. You have two options of reactivating an expired plan.
The first option is to create a copy of the expired plan by clicking on the duplicate icon. Then, you can determine its updated settings, including the start and end dates.
The second option is to click on the expired plan name and change the end date to a future date. Go through each step to ensure that all plan settings are correct before clicking Finish & Save Plan.