Bear with me here, I'm not a Payroll person. Here is the situation. We have an employer contribution (aka "deduction" in lawsonese) each employee that is signed up for a particular benefit is eligible to receive. However, if they do not get a paycheck, such as if on leave or a per diem employee, they employer deduction never comes out.

How can we ensure that every eligible employee gets the contribution/deduction (easy part) and have it still be accounted for as a transaction in the files associated with a regular payroll when they don't get a check (hard part)? Does anyone have a similar situation and how are you doing this?

Any info appreciated.

-GW

How about letting the "deduction" go into arrears. Next time they're paid, the deduction would catch-up.

That's a good idea, thanks. But in our situation we really need to get the company contribution out to the employee each payroll because it is for their Health Savings Account (HSA) and they most likely need that money while they're out. So the arrears wouldn't be good for this situation. Keep those ideas coming...

This will be my first stab at this great forum so HELLO everybody!!!

3Monkey,

I'm not a payroll guy either but I think you need to talk to your payroll/benefits Analyst.
There is a functionality called Retro Pay/Deduction which unfortunately is not delivered by Lawson. I have been into many ERP changes and everytime I have to write a program to create retro pay/deduction based on benefit plan. In your case this is just a simple as creating a one time deduction or pay and load into Lawson via PR239 or PR539 and/or PR530.

What I cannot understand is that why your non-regular employees have benefits at all. In my company we have many types of employees like on-call, temporary, contractors, etc but they don't qualify with the requirements of our benefits program. These are the people who does not get paid when they don't work during the pay period.

MannieJ:

Thanks for the suggestion, and welcome to the forum. I like the idea about one time deductions and will research that avenue.

The employees affected are signed up for a high deductible medical insurance plan which entitles them to the HSA. Depending on what level they are (PT, FT, per diem) they pay different amounts for their premiums. But they're all entitled to the employer contribution for the HSA which is paid to a 3rd party account administrator every pay period - whether the emp got paid this period or not.

We don't have any other benefits set up this way.

-GW

That should be a simple and straight program since you are only dealing with one benefit plan. The last retro -ben program I wrote involves all types of benefit plans that you can imagine. The program uses lots of arrays extensively because these retro pays or deductions can expand into many future pay periods.

Good luck.

3Monkeys - I don't know a heck of a lot about HSA's, personally, but you state that employees pay varying amounts into their HSA's - are they enrolled in an actual benefit plan (BN15), or do they just have deductions assigned to them via PR14? Is the company amount the same, regardless of what the employee portion is? If you're using PR14 for your deductions, you could consider setting up an actual benefit plan on BN15 with a company contribution only, and then you could use BN320 (Premium report) to pay the company amount. Just a thought.... :merc:

You can enter a benefits only time entry for them. We have a pay code set up on PR20.4 called BNO-Benefits Only that has a calculation type of H-Hours Only.

We set up a standard time record for people who aren't getting paid to make sure that company-paid deductions will process for that employee. Any other employee-paid deductions will go into arrears.

Thanks to all for your suggestions. Lawson tells me the only way this will work is if we enter them as arrears, which we don't want, or create an Hours Only pay code like jedmiston says. I'm going to try that route.

As far as HSAs go, yes it is a benefit and an employee can decide to have any amount withheld for their contribution but the company contribution is always the same per pay. The company contribution is currently an annual amount spread over a year's worth of pay periods.

Thanks again.
-GW