Busy work is just the best, isn’t it? Spending hours combing through a seemingly endless number of spreadsheets just to ensure their accuracy, sorting through a sea of paperwork, or maybe even just prompting ChatGPT over and over again for friendly email responses. I mean, it’s these little moments that we all live for and hope to see while we’re at work. All jokes aside, though, it can be really easy to get caught up in tasks that, while important, can become tedious and time-consuming. And this isn’t even considering all of the other work that you surely have to do and is almost certainly just as important.
At Payday HCM, we understand this struggle. Aside from the fact that we also have to participate in our fair share of busy work from time to time, we also have had plenty of clients come to us with concerns about how much time certain tasks would take. This is especially relevant in the world of benefits, where something like benefits reconciliation can take up a substantial portion of your time. Given that our foremost concern is ensuring our client’s success, finding a way to automize these processes—regardless of whether someone chooses to utilize our services or not—is a top priority.
That’s why, in this article, we’ll be going over how Payday HCM is utilizing AI to automize and streamline the process of benefits reconciliation. We spoke with our Benefits Implementation Manager, Delphina Inez, about the kind of tool Payday has partnered with developers on creating and what its capabilities are. We’ll touch on not only its functionality but also its potential for saving you and your business valuable time. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better idea of what the future of human capital management holds and how Payday is helping make that future a reality.
In this article, you will learn:
- What Is Benefits Reconciliation?
- Bear AI: How AI Can Help Automize Benefits Reconciliation
- AI And Benefits Reconciliation: How AI Is Moving The Industry Forward
What Is Benefits Reconciliation?
Firstly, we’ll start off by briefly going over what benefits reconciliation is and the kinds of issues businesses face when performing it.
Benefits Reconciliation
As an employer, you may have any number of reasons why an employee would either be added or removed from your organization’s benefits plan. Whether it’s open enrollment, an employee resigning, or some other reason, people move in and out of an organization all the time. When this happens, you want to ensure that your benefits costs are correct and up to date.
Benefits reconciliation is the process of ensuring this. Essentially, reconciliation involves cross-examining a carrier's invoices with an employer’s enrollment data to ensure that there are no discrepancies. You want to ensure your organization isn’t paying too much or paying for employees who no longer work for your company.
Manual Processes And Issues With Reconciliation
Reconciliation can be a very time-consuming process. In its simplest form, reconciliation would involve manually double-checking your invoices with your employee enrollment data, something that can not only take a lot of time but could be open to mistakes as well. There is benefits reconciliation software that can perform this task, but this is another cost to consider.
Reconciliation is an extremely important process, however. Without it, employers can accumulate unnecessary costs, according to Inez. Employees could stay within the benefits system for months, but by the time an employer realizes this, it may be too late to remove them for all of that time paid retroactively. This can add up to thousands of dollars in costs.
“The other thing is that it could impact your benefits. So if… you go to another employer, and you get insurance with Blue Cross Blue Shield (and) you're still enrolled in Blue Cross Blue Shield… they're gonna be fighting each other… So your insurance is pretty much at a halt,” Inez said.
Bear AI: How AI Can Help Automize Benefits Reconciliation
The question then becomes: how can you automate this process so that your organization can save time and money? The answer, we discovered, may lie with AI.
Bear AI’s Benefits Reconciliation Tool
Payday has partnered with a team of developers to create a tool called Bear AI that, alongside a tool to detect positive or negative sentiment within an email, will also help businesses to automate their reconciliation processes, according to Inez. All you’ll need to do is upload your invoice and a report with your employee information.
“The system will then reconcile that invoice for you. It will flag if the employee was not deducted the correct amount, was not enrolled with the carrier, not enrolled correctly, or on the invoice but shouldn't be,” Inez said.
According to Inez, the tool will help businesses not only cut down on time spent performing the reconciliation process but also save them money by reducing the amount of time a member of the organization spends on reconciliation.
Utilizing the Tool
Much like the other AI tool Payday has partnered to develop, the benefits reconciliation tool will operate on a credits system. Essentially, businesses will use a credit so that the system will then go through and reconcile an invoice with their enrollment information.
“It looks at how you're enrolled. So, if it's (an) employee only on the baseline and medical, (the tool is) able to match, ‘okay, he is on the right plan. This is the total premium. This is what the employer pays per month. This is what he pays per month.’ It ties out… It's just to make sure that you're enrolled in the right plan, your deductions are correct, and the employer's contributing the correct amount,” Inez said.
AI And Benefits Reconciliation: How AI Is Moving The Industry Forward
While the Bear AI tool is still in active development, its implications for automating what once was a very labor-intensive process are undeniable.
Active Development
The development and creation of the benefits reconciliation tool remains active, with Payday working closely with our partners to ensure each part of the tool is as functional as possible. Inez said she meets with the development team frequently to go over what’s working and what’s not and functionalities they’d like to see added.
“We do our testing. (The developer) writes down all the notes of what's working for us, what's not working for us… He goes back to the developers and says, ‘This is what you need to fix,’” Inez said.
The Future of Bear AI
Ultimately, the goal with Bear AI is to create a tool that not only Payday can use but also businesses of all types, according to Inez. Much like the customer service tool, the benefits reconciliation tool is a brainchild of Payday CEO Andy Siegel. And while there are currently existing reconciliation tools, there aren’t ones fully taking advantage of AI.
“(The developers have) never done this before… As far as this reconciliation, I did ask them, ‘How many clients do you have like this? How many projects have you worked on like this? And they said, ‘No, this is the first.’ So, they had to learn and try to wrap their head around what we were trying to do,” Inez said.
Helping Benefits Benefit From AI
Two of the biggest concerns for any business are saving time and saving money. These two things are often the guiding forces behind many business decisions—unfortunately, they can often be the guiding forces behind business decisions that aren’t always for the best. Cutting costs or cutting down on processes to save time can sometimes lead to mistakes and leave you worse off than you were before. Saving time and money is a careful balancing act, one that businesses must engage with almost daily. With the AI tools Payday is working in partnership to develop, we hope to help your business make a decision that will not only save you time and money but also benefit your business in the long run.
When we’re not focusing on AI, though, we’re focused on doing a whole host of other things. From benefits to payroll to human resources, we’re always here to help. Whatever your business needs, we want to help elevate your business to the next level. Schedule a meeting with us today to learn more about our unique approach to customer service and how we can help your organization.
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