Adding your company's benefits in Eddy is helpful so you can track the appropriate withholding amounts for each employee. To add benefits you'll need to have payroll admin or Benefits admin permissions.
To start, go to Admin settings and click on the payroll page. On the left side you'll find a tab for Pre-tax deductions and also one for Post-tax deductions.
Pre-tax or post-tax?
It's important to know which benefits are pre-tax or post-tax so that payroll can be calculated accurately. If you are unsure which benefit falls in which category, talk with your broker. Or you can invite your broker as an external user so they can add these deductions for you.
Pre-tax deductions
Eddy shows 3 types of pre-tax deductions: 1) Health Insurance, Health Savings, and Retirement.
Health Insurance
The Health Insurance group is for section 125 plans.
About section 125
Section 125, also known as a cafeteria plan, is a type of employee benefit plan sanctioned by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that allows employees to pay for certain qualified expenses using pre-tax dollars.
The categories within a section 125 plan are defined by the IRS and cannot be customized. Talk with your broker or carrier if you are not confident which section 125 category fits each of your benefit offerings.
To create a health plan, select the plan type, give the plan a name (usually the name of the carrier's plan, e.g., "BlueCross Platinum 1500"), and indicate the deduction rules that match your payroll.
For a Medical plan, you can add contribution plans that spell out the different tiers of the plan (e.g., Individual, individual + spouse, family, etc.)
The start date is used to communicate to Eddy payroll when the deductions should be effective. Eddy payroll will include deduction amounts for employees when the payroll pay date is between the effective start and end dates you define. If no dates are included, then Eddy payroll will always include the deductions for each employee.
When creating a deduction policy, the dates are defaults, meaning they will be used to populate information for each employee that is subsequently added. However each employee can have a custom data.
Add employees
After the benefit policy is added, you can add employees to the policy. To do this, click the Add employees button and select employees who have elected this benefit during your open enrollment period.
Health Savings Benefits
Eddy shows all Health Savings benefit options in the post-tax section. The following are types of health savings benefits that you can add:
- Flexible Spending Account Medical
- Flexible Spending Account Dependent Care
- Health Savings Account
The process for creating a health savings benefit is very similar to creating a health insurance plan. First the plan and its defaults are defined, then employees are added.
Retirement Benefits
Eddy shows all retirement benefit options in the post-tax section, even though some of these plans are actually pre-tax. The following are types of retirement plans you can add:
- 401(k)
- 403(b)
- 457
- Roth 401(k)
- Roth 403(b)
- Roth 457
- SIMPLE IRA retirement plan
The process for creating a retirement benefit is very similar to creating a health insurance plan. First the plan and its defaults are defined, then employees are added.
Sync deductions with Employee Navigator
If you or your broke use Employee Navigator for open enrollment and benefits administration, check out our guide to integrating Eddy with Employee Navigator.
You will need to create your benefits in Eddy in order to do the plan mapping step. You don't need to add all your employees to the plans, but the plans must be added. The plan IDs will be generated during the integration process .