Your company has chosen the option to be self-billed instead of list billed — now what?
As a company, you have just made your work ten times easier by implementing a benefits technology platform to streamline your benefits enrollment and management processes! The next step in simplifying your company’s workload is to use the benefits technology platform to help coordinate the billing process with your carriers.
Before the new platform, your company was presumably list billed, which is heavily dependent on timing and isn’t updated in real-time. This is due to enrollments or employee changes being received by the carrier after the current month’s bill was generated. Delays in timing like this are infamous sources of frustration between your company and the carrier, such as bills that never match! Taking advantage of the self-bill option that many carriers offer companies today is a paramount solution to issues like these.
Your benefits platform is a rules-based system that helps keep your company managing its benefits to those predetermined rules. The election of benefits and benefit changes all take place within that system. Since these changes happen in real-time, these changes will be reflected on the self-bill that is produced by the benefits platform. That is, simply put, awesome. By taking this level of control over your company’s billing process, you put your business on the quickest path to success.
The most important piece to making your billing experience truly easier is to not forget the most important step: asking your carrier what information is needed on the self-bill report to accept the payment.
Most companies forget to ask this question and wonder why the self-bill option isn’t making their work quicker! The proper information needed for the self-bill report will vary from carrier to carrier, so asking for this info ahead of time will make the setup process for your platform go by much faster. The carrier may need to have account numbers, plan names, lives covered, the volume of coverage, class codes, cost, etc. to accept the payments. The proper information on the self-bill report will give the carrier the details they need to process your payment and apply the funds to your account correctly.
The Short Takeaway
Taking the time early in the benefits platform setup to understand what is needed will help make your work life easier. With the carrier applying the funds correctly, your carrier will be able to pay claims on-time and help make benefits management a breeze for your company. Reach out to your Steele Benefits Customer Success Manager to help guide you through these issues step-by-step!