Mid-year enrollment may not carry the same buzz as open enrollment season, but it’s a great opportunity to revisit critical updates, plan changes, and compliance considerations—especially for organizations managing benefits in the cloud.
Whether you’re onboarding new employees, handling qualifying life events, or making mid-cycle plan adjustments, it’s essential to ensure your systems and processes are ready.
Join RPI’s Sue Pokorny and Ariane Silva for a practical, hands-on webinar focused on navigating mid-year enrollment using Infor GHR. Session attendees will learn how to:
- Update contribution rates and coverage options mid-year
- Support life event changes and special enrollment windows
- Ensure healthcare benefits comply with ACA requirements
- Empower HR teams and employees with the tools they need to make timely, informed benefit decisions
- Review spending accounts, FSA limits, and descending balances when mid-year changes are applied
Don’t miss the chance to find out how you can improve the mid-year enrollment experience and secure your seat below.
Transcript
Sue Pokorny
Welcome to our webinar on mid-year enrollments and benefit plan changes in Infor CloudSuite. I’m Sue Pokorny, and I’m a principal consultant for the HCM practice here at RPI. I’ve been with RPI for four years, but have been working in Infor CloudSuite and Lawson platforms for the last 20-plus years. Ariane, would you like to introduce yourself?
Ariane Silva
Of course, thank you, Sue. Hi everyone, my name is Ariane Silva. I am a senior HCM consultant with RPI. I’ve been with RPI for almost 10 years now, and I work mostly with GHR and GHR Benefits implementations, which is the focus of our presentation today. We’re going to talk about mid-year enrollments and changes.
I’ll get us started, and I’ll talk a little bit about updating contribution rates and some ACA reporting considerations. Let’s go over our agenda. The first thing we’ll cover is updating your contribution rates and rate tables and how to run your benefit updates. Then we’ll talk about ACA reporting and some things you’ll need to pay attention to as you work through mid-year changes. And we’ll wrap up by discussing FSA spending accounts and limits, and talking through life events — because we know that’s a big part of mid-year changes. You have resource movements throughout the year, and you also have employees submitting qualifying events.
So we’ll touch on a couple of items that will be important to you and your organization, and tasks that are important to keep in mind as you move throughout your plan year. Let’s get started. This presentation is going to be a mix — we’ll show you some of the PowerPoint, and we intend to do some demo as well.
I’d like to start with contribution changes on your plan. For the most part, when we think about mid-year changes, we’re thinking about employee-driven changes — employees going through life events or new hires throughout the year who have new benefit elections. But there are some mid-year changes that can be driven by the organization. A couple of examples would be retirement changes. There are some scenarios where, as an organization, you are allowed to change contribution amounts. This needs to be reviewed carefully. If you’re planning on changing any of those rates, I would recommend communicating that to your legal team first and reviewing those changes to make sure they’re allowed. In certain scenarios you wouldn’t be able to make those updates throughout the year. I’m going to walk you through how those changes can be made in Infor. Let me share my screen — just give us one second.
There you go. You should be able to see Infor now. For some of you, this screen isn’t going to be very familiar — I’m using the new consolidated web menu for Benefits. If you haven’t seen that yet, I do recommend taking a look at the new consolidated web menus. Infor is rolling them out, and I believe they’re going to make them GA next April, April 2026. So as soon as possible, if you can start enabling those menus in your test environment — it might require updates to some training documentation — make sure everybody’s comfortable with the new menus. And this isn’t only for Benefits. There are new consolidated web menus for HR Administration, Absence, Performance, and all the different modules within HR Talent. So bear in mind that what I’m showing here, some of the forms or screens, might look a little different for you.
The first place I’ll take you is the benefit plans. In this example, we have a change happening mid-year for a retirement plan. The first thing you would do is update your contribution table, and you’d need to make sure you have a new date for that contribution table. The last contribution table for this plan is dated as of 1-1-2025. This plan had a match value of 100% of employee contribution up to 7%. In our exercise, we’re going to update this percentage.
We’ll change it to 8%, but our update is happening 6-1 — so it’s a mid-year change. To perform that in Infor, the first thing you’d do is copy this contribution and create a new rate, effective 6-1-2025. Once you submit, the system creates a new table dated 6-1. Some of you might be familiar with this process because for the most part you’re doing this during open enrollment. Before open enrollment starts, you have all that communication with vendors and go through negotiations, and once that’s done, you update your contributions for the new plan year. But that runs through your plan year. This is a scenario where the change happens outside of your open enrollment process.
So you would update that contribution table. The next step would be to run the benefit plan update. Updating this contribution by itself is not going to change anything on your resource records. So if I go under Maintenance, Benefit Plans, and look at my retirement contributions, you can see that my match hasn’t changed yet. If I go back to my contribution, I should now be able to update this contribution for 6-1.
For that update to be reflected, we need to run a job that’s now under your maintenance processes, called Benefit Plan Updates. This job needs to run in order for you to see those changes flow through to the employee. As you can see, the system already tells me that I updated a contribution — there’s a new date for this plan — and it’s basically telling me this plan will need an update. Once you look into your Benefit Plan Updates and review the changes required, you can simply click Create Report. This will run the job and the updates will be effective. I’ll select my benefit plan here — you can see this is the coverage class Employee.
You can do two things here. This report has an option to update those records immediately, meaning all those changes will be effective immediately on the resource record. Or you can run the job in report mode, where you’d see a preview of the changes and then process them afterward. For the sake of time, I’ll go ahead and update immediately. Then I’ll select the date through which I’m running my updates — our date was 6-1. If you had two updates for this plan, you’d run them in the order in which you need them to be effective. So if you made a change 1-1-2025 and another 6-1-2025, you’d run 1-1 first and then 6-1. There’s also a Create Transactions option — you’d only select that if you have files that use the transactions and you need to track them, in which case you’d select an update with the correct reason. Then you can submit, and the job runs.
The end goal is that all the employees currently enrolled will have their records updated.
As a side note: if you want to check when your jobs are processing versus when they’ve completed, you can always select your Async Administrator, and it will tell you if the job is running or still needs to be completed. It looks like my job completed, so I’ll go back to maintenance processes.
Ariane Silva
You can see here that all the records have been updated. If I double-click one of those records, I can see my update for 6-1 — my match went from 7 to 8. Now if I go back to Maintenance, Benefit Plans, and look at the resources enrolled in my 403B plan, you can see those changes are now in effect. Another important thing to keep in mind when making these changes — especially in retirement plans — is to make sure all of those limits are being tracked and that BSI has been configured. BSI is the integration with payroll that ensures none of those plans go over limits. Sue is going to talk about that a bit more. But one of the first steps you’d take when you have mid-year changes is updating those contribution tables, creating new versions of the tables, and running this benefit plan update. This job ensures all those changes flow through to the resource record.
So we covered updates on contribution tables. Another thing I want to briefly talk through before I hand it over to Sue is ACA reporting, and what you should keep in mind during the year. We usually think about ACA in November and December when we need to run the reports and create 1095s. But ACA reporting is something you should keep an eye on throughout the year, so that when you run your reporting at year-end, you don’t run into any big issues and can successfully complete it.
One of the first things I’d like to touch on is the configuration on a plan. Your medical plans will have an ACA reporting section that needs to be populated, under the Main tab. However, under the Contribution tab, you also have a section for ACA reporting, so make sure you’re updating that as well — especially if you’re making mid-year changes and creating new contribution tables. Make sure that once you copy a table, those settings come over and are up to date.
Another reminder: if you have life events in Infor and you’d like the system to create offers based on those life events, there’s a setting on the enrollment rules called Create ACA Offers that needs to be enabled. What happens then is that every time someone goes through the life event process and the life event is approved, the system will create an offer of coverage for that person following the date of the life event. So in order for that process to work, you’d need to have that selected on your enrollment rules. These are a couple of things to keep in mind as you make mid-year changes for those medical plans.
I have an example here of a resource that had a birth event in effect 6-10. You can see how the system stopped the coverage of the existing offer of coverage and creates a new record as of 6-10 — that’s how it works if you have the setting we just talked about enabled.
Another item to look at is when you run your Mass Create Eligibility — there’s a setting to create ACA offers. So if you have this job scheduled, make sure you’re selecting that option, and the system will create an offer of coverage for newly eligible employees. I believe that’s what I wanted to cover here. I’m going to hand it over to Sue so she can talk more about the changes driven by employees — all those mid-year enrollments.
Sue Pokorny
Yes, thank you. Let’s talk about the limits on your flexible spending accounts or health savings accounts. As we all know, there are times when our open enrollment events occur before the new limits have been published. That doesn’t mean you can’t change them after the start of the year. As Ariane demonstrated, you’ll need to create a new contribution rule, update the limits on that rule, and then run your benefit plan updates — this will update the limits on your active enrollments.
But let’s take a closer look at how your payment schedules and contribution histories also impact these accounts. The benefit cycles remaining on your payment schedules are what drive the calculations for your mid-year FSA enrollments. The system uses the cycles remaining to determine the number of contributions the employee will have through the end of the year, and it uses those contributions to calculate the new deduction amount.
If you’re running a bi-weekly payment schedule, let’s assume you have 26 payment deductions each year. You need to make sure the benefit cycles remaining start at 26 and count down, covering all your pay periods for that year. You’ll also want to make sure the current pay period has advanced and is set to the correct date. Let’s take a closer look at payment schedules in the system and how we set those up.
Give me just a minute. The payment schedules are found in the Benefits menu under Administration. Under the Payroll tab, we’ll click on Payment Schedules and open this up. In our sandbox, we’re using 24 semi-monthly payments for our deduction cycles, so we’re going to set it up starting at 24. If we go over to Pay Periods, this is where the benefit cycles remaining are populated. And if I advance to the current year —
We’re in 2025. We have two payments per month, so our first benefit cycle remaining will start at 24 and then count down every pay cycle. If I have three pay periods in a month, I just duplicate that count and it won’t take that additional deduction. I count down to the end where I hit one, and then the new pay year starts. Setting up your benefit cycles remaining is crucial to your deductions calculating correctly when you have your FSA enrollments.
I also want to take a look at your contribution history. Another item to be aware of is the contribution history on the employee’s enrollment. If you’re in GHR payroll, the contribution history updates automatically after each pay period. But if you’re still in S3 payroll, you need to make sure you’re sending the contribution history back up to GHR — whether via an interface or an upload through add-ins, you need to get that contribution history in there. The system uses contribution history to keep the employee from exceeding the annual limits you’ve set on their plans.
Let’s take a look in the system at my current FSA enrollment in GHR. Just a second as I change over my screens. I’m going to pull up George Washington — that’s me today. He’s currently enrolled in the flexible spending account for medical, his enrollment started January 1st, and right now it’s going through the end of the flex year.
If we look at his details, when he enrolled on January 1st there were 24 cycles, and he elected to contribute $600. When we look at his Payroll tab, the system used those 24 cycles divided by 600, so his contribution amount is $25 per paycheck. Now let’s look at how the contribution history and benefit cycles are going to impact my life event.
I’m going to hop over to my employee side and go to Benefits. Here you can see I’m currently enrolled in my FSA plan for medical at $25 a paycheck. I’m going to go to Life Events and say I recently got married, then create an event. My event took place, let’s say, 5-31.
I’m going to skip down through all this and go right to the enrollment. Here are my health plans — I got a little error on my dental, and the same with my vision. Let me select those quickly; I’m just going to waive them. On my FSA plans, I can see there are 14 contributions left, and I’m currently enrolled at $25 per paycheck. I want to update this. You can see it shows I’ve already made $250 in deductions for the calendar year. I’m going to bump this up to $3,300.
And I want the annual total by year-end. This option means that by the end of the flex plan year — or the calendar year — I want to contribute a total of $3,300. The system knows, based on my contribution history, that I’ve already contributed $250, so it subtracts $250 from $3,300 to determine how much I have left to contribute. Then it divides that by the number of contributions I have left, 14, and calculates my payment.
If I were to do additional year-to-date contributions instead, that option says: in addition to what I’ve already contributed, I want to contribute another $3,300. Since I’ve already contributed $250 and the annual limit is $3,300, if I tried to process this, it would give me an error.
The third option is per pay period. If I tried to do something like $600 per pay period with 14 pay periods left, and I’ve already done $250, the system calculates those numbers, adds in the amount, and tells me I’m over the limit — preventing me from doing that. So your contribution history and your number of benefit cycles remaining are very important to ensure your FSA accounts load and work properly. I’m going to go with the annual total by the end of the year, $3,300.
I’ve already done $250, and I have 14 contributions left. I hope someone can do the math, but that’s going to put my contributions at $217 and change for the rest of the year. So that’s how important contribution history and benefit cycles remaining are to ensure these operate correctly.
Another item I want to mention quickly is how to handle any special enrollment needs you might have. For example, maybe you’re offering a new plan mid-year, or you need to have a small open enrollment due to changes in a specific union contract. You can manage these changes and offer employees the new benefits without waiting for your next open enrollment. You simply create a new open enrollment event and assign it to the affected employee group. You create a new enrollment group and the new enrollment rules to go along with that event, restricting their options to just the specific plan or whatever change is occurring. You don’t have to wait for the annual process — you can do that any time of the year.
This pretty much concludes our webinar for today. If you have any questions, please feel free to email questions@rpic.com and Ariane or I will get back to you. Have a great day, everyone.
Ariane Silva
Thank you, everyone.
