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, titled Benefit Types) and Elections (titled Benefit Elections). Member Groups, also in HR Settings, is where eligibility is set up — see HR Settings.
Benefit Types
Each benefit type has a name and a code (both required), 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 tagged to a single country.
Taxable is on by default. Turn it off for a non-taxable allowance, such as a tax-free meal allowance, and the non-taxable part is left out of taxable pay. You can also set a Non-taxable limit and choose whether it applies per month, per pay period, or per year — anything above the limit is taxed. Leave the limit empty if the whole amount is non-taxable.
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: their name, code, and category are locked.
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, the number of dependants covered, and an effective date (with an optional end date). A few things are worth knowing:
- Leaving the elected amount 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.
- The dependants count is for your records; payroll doesn't price benefits by dependants.
A member group is what makes an employee eligible for a benefit type in the first place — each member group has its own list of benefit types in HR Settings. An election records what the employee actually took, on top of that eligibility. If you create no elections, employees simply receive their member group's defaults.