Benefits
Enroll employees in a benefit plan
Enroll an employee in a plan, approve and activate the enrollment so payroll deducts it, add dependants and beneficiaries, and suspend, resume or cancel it.
3 min readLast updated
In this article
An enrollment links one employee to one benefit plan. It prices the benefit for the coverage the employee chose and, once active, is what payroll deducts every month. Enrollments move through a short approval: pending, approved, then active.
Before you start
The plan must be active. See benefit plans.
If HR has opened an enrollment period, the enrollment date must fall inside it, the plan must be offered in it and the employee must be eligible for it. See enrollment periods. When no period is open, you can enroll at any time.
Create an enrollment
Open People › Benefits › Enrollments and select New enrollment.
Choose the Employee and the Plan.
Choose the Coverage option: employee only, employee + spouse, employee + children or family. With a percentage-priced plan this changes the cost.
Set the Effective date, the day cover and the deduction start. When an enrollment period is open, the form shows the date its coverage begins.
Set the Enrollment date if it is not today.
Enter the number of Dependents the enrollment allows.
Select Save.
The system gives the enrollment a number, prices it from the plan and saves it as pending. The same employee cannot be enrolled twice in the same plan from the same effective date; the message names the existing enrollment and its status.
Approve and activate
Open the enrollment's Actions menu and select Approve, or Reject with a reason.
On the approved enrollment, open Actions again and select Activate.
Activation takes the plan's current price again, so a price change made between enrolling and activating is picked up.
Add dependants and beneficiaries
These actions appear once the enrollment is active or suspended.
Select Add dependent and enter the Name, the Relationship and the Date of birth. Only relationships covered by the coverage option are listed: spouse for employee + spouse, children for employee + children, both for family. An employee-only enrollment covers the employee alone, so no dependants can be added. The form shows how many of the allowed dependants are already used.
Select Add beneficiary and enter the Name, the Relationship and the Percentage of the benefit they receive. A beneficiary can be anyone, including a parent.
How the enrollment affects pay
Each payroll run deducts the employee's monthly cost of every active enrollment whose effective date falls on or before the last day of the pay period.
The employer's monthly cost is recorded on the payslip as a company contribution.
The deduction is the full monthly amount; it is not prorated for a part month.
Suspend, resume or cancel
Suspend pauses an active enrollment. Payroll stops deducting it until you select Resume, and deductions continue from the next run.
Cancel ends a pending, approved, active or suspended enrollment. It stops future deductions but does not refund past ones.
A rejected enrollment stays on the list with its reason, separate from cancelled ones.
Common questions
The employee is enrolled but nothing is deducted. Check that the enrollment is active, not only approved, and that its effective date is on or before the end of the pay period.
Can employees enroll themselves? No. Employees see their enrollments on the My benefits page of the self-service portal; HR creates and approves them here.