Is anyone importing a Benefitfocus Payroll Deduction File to their Lawson Payroll System

We, too, are implementing Benefitfocus right now. I'd love to hear about any issues to avoid, etc, as well. Thank you!

We are in the process of working with BenefitFocus on the interface files. They have a layout for 'Deductions' but it isn't in the PR514 layout. Since they said they have worked with other Lawson customers and have developed PR514 layouts, we asked them for a PR514 file. Of course this is at a cost. We also asked for a PR530 file for our imputed income codes (excess life, domestic partner imputed income from medical and dental coverage.

We receive the change files from BenefitFocus every two weeks. We have then format the file so we can load it to BN31.1 via MSAddins. We have set up the Health, Dental, Vision, HSA, and Flex Spending Accounts benefit plans in Lawson and load the elections for purposes of creating the deduction records. We have some of our voluntary benefits set up as deductions but those come from the individual voluntary benefit carriers.
We provided BenefitFocus with all our plan codes and plan options and they worked with us to set up of feeds so we could load right into Lawson with little manipulation.

LisaN - how are you doing your imputed income for domestic partner medical and dental coverage?

We have been using Benefit Focus for several years now. We send them an employee file daily which they call their inbound file. We receive a file from them weekly which they call their outbound file. We have a scheduled program that runs each Friday morning that goes to their SFTP site to retrieve the file. Our program reformats that file into the PR514 format to import to Lawson and we automatically kick off the PR514 import to Lawson. This system works good most of the time except for open enrollment. They were not sending the stop records if someone changes elections. We had to pull reports to determine who changed and upload the changes back in. This is a pain and we are working with them now to resolve this going forward for next year's enrollment. The other pain we have suffered is with UNUM. We have voluntary products with them and they just flow through to BF and to us. Unum sent their OE changes in Dec for a start date of 2/1/15 which is our fiscal year. Because this is a PR14 change, it overroad the deduction that was there. In addition, we still use the benefits module for the company paid life and ad&d because of the GTL taxable wage job.

The demographic file we send BenefitFocus has annual salary so they will be able to calculate the imputed piece for life ins. They also control all the premiums and costs for the benefit plans so they will be able to determine the imputed for medical and dental. They are going to send us the information in the PR530 layout every pay period and we'll just process the batch like we do with our Kronos timerecords.

Thank you everyone for your very informative replies.

Hi aphillips,

Would it be possible for you to provide me with the PR514 file layout that you are using with Benefitfocus? Your Benefitfocus setup is very similar to what we are in the process of implementing with them. Thank you for including in your reply the very interesting issues that you have encountered and are working on resolving with Benefitfocus.

BenefitFocus is planning on sending us a Payroll Deduction File in the format of the Lawson PR514 file layout. The fields/columns that they plan on having in the file are "EdmFc, EdmCompany, EdmEmployee, EdmDedCode, EdmNextAmount, EdmEffectDate and EdmEndDate". Can anyone with prior experience of the PR514 layout tell me if there are additional fields that I will need in order for the PR514 to accept and process our BenefitFocus Payroll Deduction File for employee deduction adds and changes?

Here is what I use.
EdmFc,EdmCompany,EdmEmployee,EdmDedCode,EdmNextAmount,EdmBalanceType,EdmBalanceAmt,EdmEffectDate

Looks like you should be ok. We use this for our Cafeteria Charges with the whole balance deducted from their check so the amount goes to zero.

JimY, Thank You for your posting.

We are looking to use PR514 to Add, Change and Stop the following types of employee deductions, Medical, Dental, Vision, Disability, Life and Flex Spending Accounts. I guess that once we start testing the PR514 using a BenefitFocus Payroll Deduction File will we then determine if additional PR514 fields are needed from the PR514 layout in order process these types of employee deductions.

 

Does anyone have experience that they can share using the PR514 for adding, changing and stopping the types of employee deductions mentioned above?

Hi agersh,
I sent you a message a while back. You may contact me at Ann.Phillips@hibbett.com and I will be glad to share what we are currently doing with Benefit Focus.

In addition to the fields mentioned above by JimY, we also have EdmEndDate on our file This or a zeroed out NextAmount value are used to to indicate stopped deductions. We have a pre-PR514 job that determines if a deduction record exists already and is an Add or Change.

Hello ~

I know that this post is several years old. 

However...Can you confirm something?  We're migrating to Lawson v10x in the Cloud and plan to use PR514 to load deductions from different vendors.
Do you only have provide data for fields that you are required to load, which should then match the fields defined in your header record? 
I am assuming that:
1) you don't have to define and pass a value for every PR514 field (even if it's null), and
2) if the last field of data you need to provide happens to be column 10 that you don't need to provide commas for columns 11 and beyond.

3) you only pass data for the fields that you intend to load (obviously including required fields)

 

In your message, I see that the headers passed are

"EdmFc, EdmCompany, EdmEmployee, EdmDedCode, EdmNextAmount, EdmEffectDate and EdmEndDate"

I assume that the data fields in your detail records would then only pass data for these fields, correct?

Thanks....