Setup Considerations: Benefits for Mergers and Acquisitions
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and updates resulting from a merger or acquisition. It explains:
- Why to set it up.
- How it fits into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What It Is
When you're part of a merger with or acquisition, you can use Workday Benefits to update your benefit plans and transition employees to new or changing benefits.
Business Benefits
If you continue to use Workday for benefits as a result of a merger or acquisition, you can:
- Save effort by adding new benefit groups, providers, plans, and events to your existing tenant configuration.
- Can easily import new workers, while preserving existing worker data.
Use Cases
- Transition employees to new or change benefit elections.
- Change payroll earnings and deductions for new or updated benefit plans.
- Gather and import Affordable Care Act 1094-C and 1095-C data for new employees.
Questions to Consider
Question
| Considerations
|
Will an acquired company keep their current benefits? | If yes, you can add plans and providers to Workday. If not, you can add them to existing plans with new benefit groups. |
Do you have new locations? | Consider adding new benefit groups for new locations, especially if they are in a different country. |
Do you need to run an off-cycle open enrollment event for new employees? | The simplest way to trigger benefit elections is through the hire process.
However, if you need to change plans for existing employees, you can run an off-cycle open enrollment event. You need to:
|
After a merger, who is eligible for your new benefit plans? | You can update eligibility rules to ensure that new employees are only eligible for any new benefit groups. You can run the View Workers in Multiple Benefit Groups Audit job to check your eligibility rules. |
Do you have new providers? | You need to create new providers if new employees have unique providers. Also, if you have a new location, your existing providers might not be available there so you might need to find new providers. |
Do you have new benefit plans? | If you create new providers, you need to create new plans.
With new plans, you:
|
Do you have new vendors? | You can check the Workday Cloud Connect for Benefits catalog for Workday-provided vendor templates. |
Recommendations
- To maintain a clear enrollment history for new employees, create a new open enrollment event type for an off-cycle open enrollment.
- Check your rate frequencies for benefit groups, benefit plans, and pay groups. Determine whether they need to match. Example: Monthly versus quarterly.
- Consider enabling the Mobile Open Enrollment app, especially if any employees don’t have personal computers.
Requirements
Review the Open Enrollment Checklist on Community. The checklist helps you verify that you have made all new and updated changes. It can help with your questions before you begin setup.
If you run an off-cycle open enrollment event, create a benefit group for the new employees to trigger the event.
Create new benefit plans or providers. Don’t rename an existing benefit plan or provider. These changes impact current integrations and benefit enrollment history.
If you create a new event type, you need to add the new type to your enrollment event rules.
Prepare for ACA 1095-C reporting for United States employees:
- Collect and store data from prior years in case of IRS auditing.
- Ensure that you have all the data needed to file with the IRS for the acquisition or merger calendar year.
- Prepare the Import 1095-C Data EIB with any months that you include for your ACA filing that aren't already in the tenant. Consult your legal counsel to determine the correct number of 1094-Cs for each tax year.
- Be aware of any new U.S. states for your employee population. There might be state level 1095-C filing requirements.
Limitations
No impact.
Tenant Setup
In the Tenant Setup for HCM, under Benefits
, you can select the Enable Mobile Benefits
check box to enable the open enrollment on the Workday Benefits mobile app.Security
Domains | Considerations |
|---|---|
Set Up: Tenant Setup - HCM in the Systems functional area. | Enables the administrator to enable or disable benefit configuration options in the Edit Tenant Setup - HCM task |
Set Up: Benefits in the Benefits functional area. | Enables the benefits administrator to access open enrollment configuration tasks. |
Worker Data: Benefit Eligibility in the Benefits and Personal Data functional areas. | Enables the benefits administrator to access the Benefits Eligibility by Worker report. |
Worker Data: Benefits in the Benefits and Personal Data functional areas. | Enables the benefits administrator to manage worker's benefit elections, including access to the Benefits tab on the worker profile. |
Worker Data: Insurance Calculated Coverage in the Core Compensation functional area. | Gives the benefits administrator access to the Calculated Coverage report field. Administrators can view individual worker's calculated coverage amounts for the plans they enroll in. |
Self Service: Benefits in the Benefits functional area. | Enables employees to complete benefit elections |
Business Processes
You can add worklets for embedded analytics to business process steps, providing links to additional information.
Ensure that you configure the worklets on each business process.
Business Processes | Considerations |
|---|---|
Change Benefits for Open Enrollment
| Initiates open enrollment for benefits. |
Change Benefits
| Launches the Change Benefits for Life Event business process. |
Change Benefits for Life Event
| Initiates enrollments for life events, including births, divorce, and promotion. |
Reporting
Reports or Dashboards | Considerations |
|---|---|
Active and Completed Open Enrollment Status Report
| Use this report to view and manage the status of active and completed enrollment election events. This report provides more detail than the Open Enrollment Status Report , but can take a long time to run. Workday recommends that you limit your use to managing enrollment elections after finalizing open enrollment events. |
Benefit Corrections in Progress Audit
| Use this report to view a list of benefit corrections that you've started, but not yet submitted. |
Benefits Eligibility by Benefit Group
| Use this report to view future-dated benefits groups. You can run the report for each benefit group using the open enrollment event date. Compare the reports to ensure that no workers exist in more than 1 group. |
Benefit Events Status Report
| Use this report to view workers with benefit events and the status of those events. |
Finalize Open Benefit Events
| Use this task to clean up all outdated enrollment events. |
Manage Evidence of Insurability Status
| Use this task to clean up all outdated EOI requests. |
Open Enrollment Status Report
| Use this report to view and manage workers with open enrollment events. You can view the status of those events before finalizing enrollment. This report provides better performance than the Active and Completed Open Enrollment Status report. |
Terminated Employees Eligible for Benefits
| Use this report to view the terminated employees that can still receive benefits. |
View Benefit Eligibility Rule Results
| Use this report to troubleshoot to see why someone is or isn't meeting an eligibility rule. |
View Workers in Multiple Benefit Groups Audit
| Use this job to view workers eligible for more than 1 benefit group so that you can troubleshoot this issue. Don't use for future-dated benefit groups. |
Workers for Benefit Group by Most Recent Benefit Event
| Use this RDS to create a custom report that audits benefit enrollments data. |
Workers no longer eligible for Open Enrollment
| Use this report to view workers who aren’t eligible for benefits but currently have an open enrollment event. |
Integrations
Give yourself plenty of lead time for testing a new integration.
Workday Benefit Connectors:
- Providers: Workday provides integration templates through Workday Cloud Connect for Benefits (CCB). There’s a CCB template for each provider. For new providers, check the Cloud Connect for Benefits catalog. You can also use third-party integrations that Workday doesn't support as part of CCB.
- Affordable Care Act: Workday provides the ACA Connectors to assist with reporting to the IRS.
When you offer a new benefit plan with the same provider, link the plan to your existing integration. Likewise, if you discontinue a plan, remove the integration link.
You can change integration maps for benefit providers to specify how values in Workday map to values in an external endpoint.
If you’re introducing new benefit plans or employee locations, you’ll likely need to update your integration mapping. Example: Some medical providers require a unique proprietary vendor code that you need to send for each state. You might need to map codes for states that haven't had employees.
Consider how to include payroll balances. CCB integrations can only access actual contribution amounts from Workday Payroll. If you use a third-party payroll provider, benefit integrations send estimated amounts based on the benefit plan setup.
Connections and Touchpoints
Benefits enrollment interacts with Payroll for plan-related deductions and credits.
These types of employee data drive eligibility rules for benefit plans:
- Exempt status.
- FTE.
- Job profiles.
- Management levels.
- Pay rate type.
- Scheduled weekly hours.
Compensation data can impact benefit plans like insurance.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.