Benefits Eligibility (Part 2 in series)

Many different factors come into play when determining employee eligibility for various types of benefits offered by an employer.    When creating a Benefit in Dynamics AX an option exists where you can set the type of eligibility which applies to that particular benefit. 

You can elect to have the benefit available to all workers.  For example, a company may offer parking passes to all employees as a fringe benefit.  When creating this benefit the Eligibility would be set to: All workers are eligible.  With other benefits such as garnishments and tax levies eligibility would not apply.  Whey creating these types of benefits Eligibility would be set to: Bypass eligibility process.  The third option for benefit eligibility is Rules based.  For example, a company may offer two different types of Life Insurance benefits to employees.  Executive employees may be eligible for one Life Insurance plan while all other full-time employees are eligible for the other Life Insurance plan.   In Dynamics AX you can create a benefit eligibility rule which would allow you to find all executive employees as well as another rule for all other full-time employees and apply those rules to the appropriate benefit. 

Dynamics AX provides users with a lot of flexibility in which to build their benefit eligibility rules.  We will walk through an example of creating  an eligibility rule for a Cell Phone benefit where only Full-time Sales Managers are eligible.  

When creating an eligibility rule the first step is to create a rule type.  Navigate to Human Resources > Setup > Policies > Benefit eligibility policy rule types.

In the Benefit eligibility policy rule types we will create a rule called Sales-Full. 

Now that you have created your Benefit eligibility rule type the next step is to create a Benefit eligibility policy. Navigate to Human Resources > Setup > Policies > Benefit eligibility.  This form allows you to define the benefit eligibility policies for one or more legal entities as well as define the specific eligibility rules to be used in the policy. 

In the Benefit eligibility list page if a policy already exists double click on it or choose the New action in the action pane.

Once you are in the Benefit eligibility policy detail form enter in a Name and Description if you are creating a new policy.

Next expand the Policy organizations fast tab.  Within this fast tab you can select one or more legal entities that this Benefit eligibility policy applies.  Note: A legal entity can only be included in one Benefit eligibility policy.

Next, expand the Policy rules fast tab.  In the list of Policy rule types we can see the rule type Sales-Full that we created previously.  You will also see any additional rule types created.  Rules are date-effective, which provides set of powerful options for manipulating rules over time without the need to create a new rule type or remembering to update the rule.

Select the Sales-Full rule and click Create policy rule.   Set the Effective date as of today and enter an Expiration date to the end of the calendar year.  Next select the + in front of Add condition.  This will add a where clause to the form.  Next click the down arrow by Worker.First name and navigate: Additional>Worker>Worker position assignment>Position>Position detail>Job>Job.Job

Once you select Job.Job, select the down arrow by contains and select is.  Next click the Enter value field and enter Sales Manager (or whatever Job name you are creating the rule for).   Our rule will now look for only workers that have a Job of Sales Manager but we also want to only include full-time Sales Mangers.   To do that select the + in front of Add condition.  Next click the down arrow by Worker.First name and navigate: Additional>Worker>Worker position assignment>Position>Position detail>Position detail.Full-time equivalent.

When you are done entering the appropriate criteria for the rule you can click Ok to close the form.  On the Benefit eligibility policy form you should now see a number 1 in parentheses after the Sales-Full rule indicating 1 rule exists for that rule type.  If you knew you wanted to extend the Cell Phone benefit next year to part-time Sales Managers as well you could create another rule for this rule type entering an effective date of January 1 of next year and only entering the criteria for the Job to equal Sales Manager and not enter in the second  condition regarding Full-time.  Then next year if you ran the eligibility process for your cell phone benefit it would automatically look to this new rule and all full-time and part-time Sales Managers would be eligible for the cell phone benefit.

Now that we have created the appropriate eligibility rule we need to assign that rule to our cell phone benefit.  See this previous blog post regarding creating benefits if you don't have a cell phone benefit created.

Navigate to the cell phone benefit  Human Resources > Common > Benefits > Benefits.  Change the eligibility field to Rule based and in the Rule type field select the Sales-Full rule type we created previously. 

If you have employees that should be "grandfathered" into the plan you can add them in the Eligibility overrides area on the benefit. 

Once you have set the appropriate eligibility information on the Benefit the next step is to create a an eligibility event.  You can do this directly from the Benefit details form or from Benefit list page by selecting the Create edibility event action in the action pane.

Eligibility events can also be created by navigating to Human Resources > Periodic > Benefits > Eligibility events or from the Workers list page.

In the New eligibility event form enter in an Event name, Description, Event type as well as Coverage start date, Enrollment period date and Days to enroll.

In the example above, we have indicated that our cell phone benefit will start for Sales Managers on May 1st.  They can begin enrolling in the benefit on April 1st and have 30 days to enroll. 

Next click on the Create event button which will open the Eligibility event details form.  In this form you can choose which Workers and Benefits you want to include in the eligibility event.   For our example we will select to add all workers to the Eligibility event and only include the Cell phone benefit.

Once you have selected the appropriate Workers and Benefits click the Process action in the action pane.   Review the information in the Process eligibility form and click OK.

An infolog will appear letting you know that the eligibility event will run as a background process so you can continue working while the event processes.  Once the process is complete the Show results action will become enabled in the Eligibility event details form (you will need to refresh the form or close and open it again).  Click the Show results action to view which workers are eligible for the cell phone benefit.  Only full-time Sales Managers should have a green check mark by their names. 

When you have completed the eligibility process you can begin enrolling your employees in the benefit.   Look for the next blog post in this series on Benefit Enrollment for more details.