Benefits
Benefits covers two screens in HR Settings: the catalog of benefits your company offers, and the record of which employees actually take which one.
Where it lives
Both screens are tabs inside the HR Settings workspace: Benefits (the catalog, called Benefit Types) and Elections (called Benefit Enrollment). Member Groups, also in HR Settings, is where eligibility is set up — see HR Settings.
Benefit Types
Each benefit type has a name, a code, a category (Meal, Health, Transport, Education, Housing, Communication, or Other), and a value type: Fixed (a flat amount), Percent (a rate), or Custom. It carries a default value and can optionally be scoped to a single country. Initialize for Country seeds a starter set of common benefit types for a country you pick, so you don't have to create every one from scratch. Types that came from that seeding are marked System and can't have their name, code, or category changed — you can still adjust their default value.
Benefit Elections
An election connects one employee to one benefit type they've actually taken, with a status of Enrolled, Waived, or Terminated, an elected amount, how many dependents it covers, and an effective date (with an optional end date). Two things are worth knowing about how the elected amount works:
- Leaving it blank isn't the same as electing zero — it means the employee gets the benefit type's default value.
- Marking an election Waived records an explicit decline and stops that benefit from being paid to that employee at all.
A member group is what grants an employee eligibility for a benefit type in the first place — a list of eligible benefit types can be set per member group in HR Settings. An election is the record of what the employee actually took, on top of that eligibility.