Open Enrollment Records: Pending vs Immediate

Looking for feedback on pros/cons of doing ESS open enrollment records pending versus immediate. We have always done our ESS open enrollment records as pending. In 2017 we started creating a nightly 834 file for our dental and health insurance vendors. We had to put a lot of special logic into the custom 834 file in order to ignore stop dates of 12/31 since they are populated as soon as an employee completes open enrollment. We are having issues when it comes to dependents who are aging out of coverage and have a stop date in the upcoming year but now have a stop date of 12/31. The question was brought up about having the pending records be immediate because then we don't have to deal with ignoring dates, comparing pending to active, etc. What are the drawbacks of doing ESS open enrollment records as immediate?

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Infor Lawson Human Resources Group - Discussion

Comments

connie-heitman

Hello,

The first year that we did Open Enrollment with Lawson ESS we had the records update immediately. That first year was did not go so well as our Open Enrollment lasts for 2 1/2 weeks and when an employee wanted to go back in and make changes the system would error out and place their elections on the BS31 screen. So I would have to go to the BS31 screen to delete the pending transactions, remove the 12/31 stop date on their BN32.2 screen, and then the employee could go back in and make changes. Second issue was with the vendor as they were frustrated with getting a file each week that kept changing. Since that year Immediate Update on the BS01 screen is "N" (pending) and we suppress the 12/31 stop dates on the vendor interfaces. Now the employees can make changes without issues and the vendors receive one file with all of the employee elections after Open Enrollment is complete. As for the dependents we allow the dependent to stay on the insurance until 12/31 of the year they turn 26.

unknown

Good morning,

We update immediately and have had no issues in 10 years. Employees can go back in and make changes to their enrollment until the period closes (our open enrollment is 3 weeks). The vendor files are managed by I.T.

unknown

We do immediate and it has worked out great. We have only been live for 2 years so this is our 2nd go round for Open enrollment, but we haven't had any issues with the immediate update.

It does take some coordination with whoever handles your vendor files. Our IT department handles our files but we get with them at the beginning of open enrollment to ensure they have logic built into the weekly files so the new enrollments do not get sent.

The only 'downside' we have is that some of our changes do require EE's to do an EOI. So we pull a report at the end of open enrollment for those plans and have a list of folks that need to have an approved EOI. If this isn't completed by the deadline, we do have to go manually remove the benefit election. Still a whole lot better than having everyone part/plan of Open Enrollment go to a pending status. Less work for our Benefits staff.

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