Articles

A New Chapter: Effortless Admin is Moving!

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:32:57 Z

The boxes are nearly packed. The finishing touches are being applied. The coffee maker is ready to go. After 40 years of calling the same space home, we're just one week away from opening the doors to our new office—and we couldn't be more excited to share it with you.

A Move Four Decades in the Making

Four decades is a long time. Our current office has witnessed countless client wins, team celebrations, late-night problem-solving sessions, and the evolution of an entire industry. It's been a good home—but we've officially outgrown it.

And honestly? That's the best problem we could ask for.

This growth isn't just about adding headcount or expanding services. It's about the trust you have placed in us every single day. It's about the partnerships that push us to be better.

Purpose-Built for What's Next

This move represents far more than a change of scenery. It's a testament to the incredible journey we've shared with our clients and partners. Your trust, your challenges, and your collaboration have fueled our growth. This new space exists because of you.

From day one of planning, we asked ourselves one question: How do we create a space that serves our clients as well as it serves our team?

We've designed our new office at College Plaza with intention:

For our team: Modern workspaces that foster collaboration, creativity, and the kind of focused work that delivers exceptional results for our clients.
For our clients: Welcoming areas where you can meet with us, collaborate on projects, or simply have a comfortable place to work when you're in Edmonton.
For our future: Room to grow alongside the partners who've made this journey possible.

We're Operational November 17

Mark your calendars: Starting November 17, we'll be fully operational at our new location. As we put the finishing touches on the space this week, we're counting down the days until we can welcome you through our new doors.

Our New Address:

Effortless Admin Inc.
Suite 1400, College Plaza
8215 - 112 Street NW
Edmonton, AB T6G 2C8

Please update your records with our new address.

You're Always Welcome

Once we're settled, stop by and see us. Whether you're in Edmonton for business or just passing through, we'd love to give you a tour, grab coffee, or simply provide a comfortable place to work between meetings.

Looking Forward

Forty years ago, we opened our doors with a vision: to make benefits administration truly effortless for our clients. That vision hasn't changed—but our capacity to deliver on it has grown exponentially.

This new space represents our commitment to that original vision and our excitement for the future we're building together.

Thank you for growing with us. Thank you for trusting us with your business. And thank you for being part of this journey.

Here's to the next 40 years—and beyond.

Admin Checkup: Evaluating Administration Models

Wed, 25 May 2022 20:19:02 Z

When you think about your benefits program, does administration come to mind?

We all know that benefits are a vital part of an organization's total compensation strategy and can make a big difference when trying to attract and retain top talent. It is easy to focus on product offerings and forget that all benefit programs come with administration requirements. Is your organization currently positioned to deliver the best benefits administration experience to both your HR team managing your benefits program and the employees who rely on the benefits you offer?

In our Admin Checkup series, we are unpacking various aspects of benefits administration to help you uncover opportunities to gain efficiency. In this article we'll be discussing the 3 most common approaches to administration:

Carrier direct
HRIS benefits module
Third party administration (TPA)

Carrier Direct Admin

The most common administration model is to use the administration system of the insurance carrier(s) and benefit product provider(s) that make up your benefits program. This default option often seems simple, at least on the surface. However, being the most common model doesn't automatically make it your best option. Most people simply aren't aware that there are other approaches to benefits plan administration.

Providers rightly focus on building great benefit products, and it is these products that you put in place to serve your employees: Health Care, Dental Care, Life Insurance, Disability Insurance, Critical Illness, Employee Assistance, Health Spending Accounts etc. For many providers though, administration is nothing more than a necessary part of the sales cycle. Provider systems are often passive and difficult to navigate. As a result, HR teams end up taking on the stressful role of being billing and compliance experts.

Carrier Direct admin doesn’t scale. Administration efforts will actually compound should your benefit program take advantage of multiple insurers and benefit providers; as HR teams have to manage repeated employee enrollment and data entry in different admin systems, each with very different processes and billing cycles. Restructure your plan, change or introduce providers, and all bets are off.

Admin systems change, processes change, timelines change, and your admin support team changes.

HRIS Benefits Module Admin

The focus of a Human Resource Management System (HRIS) or Human Capital Management System (HCM) benefits module is to help create an all-in-one solution, by bringing some of your benefits administration into your HR software. These modules can be expensive and lack robust carrier integrations, and you still end up administering directly with your providers. The old adage, "jack of all trades, master of none" rings true. You benefit from automatic payroll deductions and easier total compensation reporting. However, the tradeoff is higher cost, data management redundancy, a lack of admin data compliance and process compliance, and, to a greater degree, you still work with the inconsistencies of provider technology (see above).

Restructure your plan, change or introduce providers, and you still end up learning new provider admin systems, processes, timelines, and provider support teams. Not only that, but new provider data feeds can take time and cost you big bucks.

Third Party Administration (TPA)

Third party administration attempts to solve many of the issues noted above, but as we'll see, not all solutions are created equal. There are two core forms of third party administration: traditional vs. tech-enabled.

Traditional TPA

Traditional third party administrators consolidate your administration and billing if you take advantage of multiple carriers/providers. Restructure your plan, or change/introduce providers and your administration remains consistent. The trade-off here is that traditional TPAs often lack market access. They partner with a small set of providers and if you stray outside of their network, you are out of luck: you still end up with admin system and process changes.

Traditional TPAs also often suffer from a lack of good technology. Either they lack technology completely, and you are mired with manual admin, or their technology is outdated and requires that your team be benefits experts to administer your program in compliance with your plan design contracts.

Tech-Enabled TPA

Like traditional TPAs, tech-enabled TPAs consolidate administration and billing. Unlike traditional TPAs, tech-enabled TPAs remove much of the manual process common in administration and replace it with digital solutions. Because of a commitment to digital benefits administration solutions, some tech-enabled TPAs have the ability to integrate with your HRIS ecosystem. This facilitates the push and pull of eligibility data to keep HR, benefits and payroll systems up-to-date and thereby eliminating the multi-systems data entry.

The only significant risk with a tech-enabled TPA is their ability to connect to the larger carrier/provider market. Many still have limited market access which can handicap their ability to administer any mix of products or providers.

What administration approaches have you taken? Are there other considerations that you would include when evaluating the various administration options available? Let us know what your experience has been and what could be done to help improve that model.

Effortless Admin Featured on the Starting with One Podcast

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 01:56:16 Z

This week Zachary Lindop and Michael Ross of Effortless Admin appeared on the Starting with One podcast. They sat down with hosts Robin Bailey and Al McDonald to chat about Effortless Admin's journey from Traditional TPA to Insurtech.

Other ways to listen

2020 in Review

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 04:30:12 Z

What a year 2020 has been! It is hard to believe it’s drawing to a close already. There isn't a single person who hasn't been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in one way or another this year, and businesses are no exception.

Remember 2018?

Boy how things have changed in a couple of short years. Back in 2018, we published an article on the misperceptions of benefits administration technology in Canada. In that article, we unpacked a study commissioned by HUB International that dug into employer perceptions of employee benefits. In this study, we discovered that “more than 3 of every 4 respondents indicate that [they were] planning to implement one or more cost management strategies in the near future” yet, “only 11% of respondents [planned] to implement a new, or improve an existing, benefits administration technology platform or software solution.” There was an appetite for obvious hard cost savings but not yet a recognition that costs could be dramatically reduced through strategic admin efficiencies.

In that same article, we discussed the technology gap that exists in the world of benefits administration and why employers were not actively considering benefits administration technologies to improve their employee benefits program service delivery.

Fast Forward to Today

Fast forward to today and that technology gap has been closed.

Why? Many organizations, ours included, have been forced to send staff home to work remotely. This is something we never could have predicted and certainly did not plan for. Expected or not, as employers we’ve been left with the task of adjusting our processes to accommodate these evolving work arrangements, trying to keep our teams productive while trimming costs.

Benefits administration has become an obvious candidate for improvement with its time-consuming processes and often paper-driven or manual tasks.

The Year of Digital Admin

2020 has been the year of digital administration for many employers. Whether it is optimizing their benefits programs, their administration technology or both, we have seen a massive shift towards the adoption of technology to solve emerging benefits administration pain points.

Now more than ever employers are looking for solutions that can robustly deliver:

End-to-end digital employee self-service onboarding
Digital employee benefits program content delivery
Efficient digital administration data management
Hassle-free and cost-effective modular flex and flexible spending account re-enrollments
HCM integrations that reduce duplicate data entry between systems
And much more...

Throughout 2020 we have been able to improve on our already established digital administration toolset to better serve both administrators managing remote employees and the remote employees themselves.

Looking Ahead to 2021

While I won’t make the mistake of trying to predict what 2021 has in store for us all, what I do know is that the efficiencies of digital benefits administration are here to stay.

Want to explore what the future of administration is like? Book a demo and I’ll personally give you a tour: www.effortlessadmin.com/demo.

From everyone here at Effortless Admin, we want to wish you and your team a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. Stay safe and take care of yourself, your people and your families.

Digitizing Employee Benefits Administration

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 03:03:46 Z

Some industries have taken advantage of distributed workforces for years. Tech companies, for example, have had time to experiment with different ways to effectively manage teams working remotely. Ready or not, 2020 has seen a major shift for many organizations towards a remote (at home) workforce.

Today’s workplace communication and collaboration technologies like Slack, Zoom, Dialpad and others have helped organizations make the switch quickly. But when moving from a centralized workforce to a remote one, some administrative operations that rely on people working under the same roof have now become increasingly complex, time-consuming, and error-prone.

Employee group benefits administration falls squarely into this category.

Adapting processes to the future of work

Even in 2020, most organizations are resigned to manual, paper-driven ben admin processes. These processes are in place to meet insurance carrier requirements and are often accepted because of a tendency to ignore problems that don’t have solutions. Problem-blindness sums up group benefits technology today.

The future of work can’t be fully realized without compensation technology keeping pace. Benefits are an essential part of an employee’s compensation package and continue to increase in complexity faster than many technologies can adapt. For example, trends towards modular flex programs, flexible spending accounts, and multi-carrier plans just to name a few.

Even in the simplest plans, challenges that plague benefits administration include: the frustrating complexities of traditional plan member onboarding, admin systems and processes plagued with usability issues, billing cut offs, and month-end reconciliation. In addition, these processes are often paper-driven, require duplicate data entry, and are supported by inadequate reporting.

Meaningful ben admin solutions

This all sounds daunting, and likely all-too-familiar to those readers who work with traditional systems day to day. We at Effortless Admin work continuously with our plan sponsor and benefit advisor partners to find the way forward to a comprehensive, long term solution to these issues. Here are just a few examples that relate to onboarding:

Employee Onboarding

It’s 2020, onboarding should be paperless

Employees should be able to enroll themselves, on whatever device they have easy access to, through employee self-service onboarding. This way they can provide their data, including beneficiaries and plan elections. But it shouldn’t stop there, the enrollment shouldn’t end in paper, even if it starts digitally. A simple e-signature would ensure that the enrollment process is quick, easy and doesn’t require unnecessary followup on behalf of your organization.

Plan administrators should have simple tools that allow them to easily stay on top of their outstanding enrollments. Tools that proactively keep them in the loop and reduce the chance of late applicants.

In practice, when organizations adopt paperless onboarding processes they can save up to 90% of the time they used to invest in managing paper-driven enrollment processes. In light of real experiences like these, sticking to paper is just crazy.

See the onboarding experience in action

Content Distribution

Digital delivery, direct to the employee

Once an employee is enrolled, they need information about their new plan. This often includes benefits booklets, health and dental claims ID cards etc. Traditionally this has been delivered as paper documentation that needs to be physically distributed. Nowadays it’s often distributed by way of email, which still needs to be manually distributed, only electronically. A not so obvious problem with each of these approaches is that they are not secure.

Information should be delivered automatically, electronically, and securely directly to the newly eligible employees. Proper digital delivery like this ensures timely and secure access to important information about the benefits program you are extending to your employees.

Learn more about the plan member experience

Automatic Re-enrollment

Flex Plans should add flexibility… not arduous process

Do you offer a flexible spending account or a modular flex plan? These are great products for employees but the processes for managing them are cumbersome at best. These programs are typically manual, error-prone and costly in both time and effort for your administration team, not to mention your employee population.

Flexible spending accounts and modular flex re-enrollment should be even simpler than an employee’s initial digital onboarding. Automatic, simple and secure re-enrollments - no paper.

See modular flex enrollment and re-enrollment in action

The solution highlights the problem

Taking some time to unpack what an efficient digital administration experience should look like brings to light the administration challenges that many organizations are experiencing today. Transitioning to a true digital solution would save significant time, effort and cost and increase data compliance.

What if it existed?

Here at Effortless Admin, we started by tackling the efficiencies described above (with a bunch of other digital efficiencies mixed in along the way). We don’t have it all figured out but we wake up each and every day with a single focused goal of bringing solutions to complex problems. And there is always more work to be done.

Are there other administrative functions that take up too much of your team’s time? Can you think of any redundant processes you perform or liabilities that exist? Please let us know, maybe we have a solution for it. If we don’t let’s talk about building a solution that solves that problem in a meaningful way. We would love to hear from you.

Get in touch

Why Employers ❤️ Effortless Admin

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 21:18:45 Z

Your ability to effectively manage employee benefits should not be dependent on what benefit providers make up your plan at any given time. That’s ridiculous. Be independent with Effortless Admin and take control of your company benefits plan across all plan changes over time.

Check out our latest video on why employers choose Effortless Admin.

Adopting a “Don't Make Me Think” Design Philosophy

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:35:40 Z

User Experience (UX) design and User Interface (UI) design are both complex and multi-faceted software design disciplines. For those just starting out in their design career, or those who only wear these hats part-time, these disciplines can sometimes feel overwhelming. For a lot of small to midsize companies, having dedicated UX/UI professionals just isn't feasible.

This doesn't, however, mean your organization can't develop engaging, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing designs. I believe that anyone can significantly improve their design chops by keeping one simple end-user mantra in mind when they design just about anything:

Don't make me think!

The Book

Let me back up a step. One of my favorite user experience books of all time is Steve Krug's classic "Don't Make Me Think".

I first discovered this book when it was in its second edition back in 2007. It was around this time that I really began to dig into the whys and hows of effective user interface design.

It is a relatively short book that is packed full of easy to understand and very valuable insights. At times it may feel a bit dated, but its principles go deeper than current design trends to the core of design: understanding how users interact with your product.

The “don’t make me think” philosophy is geared towards UI/UX design but its principles (as we’ll see below) can be applied to any design oriented discipline.

The Application

It's all about asking questions. Then answering them.

The trick though is what you do with the answers. You answer each question by improving your design to address the questions before they even arise for the end user. You are looking to make the thing you are designing self-evident. I know that not everything can be completely self-evident. But that is the idea.

Remove as many barriers to understanding as possible by iterating through this question and answer process until you've addressed all of the questions in one form or another.

Consider also that better designs work to minimize cognitive load. That is, the more effort involved in understanding your design, the less usable your design is. By reducing cognitive load, the user has more patience for the unplanned hiccups they may experience with your design. And the unexpected always comes up (Murphy’s Law), so consider this in your design by putting in the work to make it easy to understand.

Let's look at a few examples of how this iterative question and answer approach to design can work in practice.

The Examples

Business Card Design

First, let’s look at an example of how we used this approach to improve our business card designs. This is the card we started with:

What questions might arise when a prospect receives this card, or goes to use the information on the card?

Where do I put this?
It's an odd shape and doesn't fit my wallet or card holder. The risk here is the card may be lost or tossed.
Where can I write on this card?
I want to write some information on the card about the person who gave it to me.
Which phone number do I use to contact his person?
There are multiple numbers that have similar priority.
What company is this for again?
I need to check both sides of the card to get a complete picture.

After asking then answering these questions, we came up with this new design:

Where do I put this?
We sacrificed a unique square card size for a standard card size that will work with any card organizing system the recipient may have in place.
Where can I write on this card?
We added white-space to the card to make room for the recipient to take notes on the card. And, we made sure the white-space was actually white.
Which phone number do I use to contact this person?
We clearly identified the purpose of the various phone numbers.
What company is this for again?
Branding was placed on both sides of the card.

Let's look at another example.

Software Design

Next up is an example of how we used this approach to improve the input of basic personal information. In order to customize the experience of the system for users we (optionally) ask users for a preferred name.

Here is the user interface we started with:

What questions might arise when a user encounters this interface and attempts to enter their name? Here are a few issues we discovered:

What is a preferred name?
Why are you asking me for a preferred name?
Is providing a preferred name required? What if I don’t have one?
Could users accidentally enter their last name in the preferred name field?

After asking then answering these questions, we came up with the following iteration in our design:

What is a preferred name?
We clarified what a preferred name is through more descriptive text.
Why are you asking me for a preferred name?
By clarifying what a preferred name is we also implicitly answered this question.
Is providing a preferred name required?
The process for setting a preferred name was made obviously optional.
Could users accidentally enter their last name in the preferred name field?
By forcing the user to intentionally choose to enter a preferred name we removed the risk of accidentally entering their last name in this field.

The Challenge

Try using this simple “Don’t Make Me Think” approach on your next design project. Once you think you've arrived at the right solution, set it aside for a while before coming back to it and intentionally working it through with fresh eyes looking for questions that your end user might have. Then work to answer those questions through the design itself.

Keep each prior iteration around to see how your designs improve as you iterate through this process and apply it over time.

In this article we considered how users actually use something, and how to use this knowledge to improve our designs. The other side of the equation relates to aesthetics or how the user perceives something. We'll consider the impact of aesthetics on user experience in a future article. Stay tuned.

Increase Employee Productivity and Satisfaction Through Exercise (at Work)

Tue, 07 May 2019 18:35:11 Z

We all know that exercise is good. It’s common knowledge that proper exercise can work to prevent weight gain and even help maintain weight loss. It is also well acknowledged that exercise can help to reduce the likelihood, and sometimes even prevent, certain diseases and health conditions. But did you know that regular exercise also helps improve your mood?

According to the Mayo Clinic, exercise has two primary influences on mood:

The first is that exercise can improve the way you feel about your body. Further to that, regular sustained physical activity can have long term positive physiological effects that go beyond weight loss to include increased self-confidence and self-esteem.

The second mood influencer is the effect that exercise has on your brain: physical activity “stimulates various brain chemicals that may leave you feeling happier, more relaxed and less anxious” (Mayo Clinic). That is a huge benefit in a day in age where life is often fast paced and stressful.

Exercise at Work = More Productivity

What’s even more interesting is that recent research has found that exercise during work hours can improve an employee’s productivity while they are at work. A study in the International Journal of Workplace Health Management found that exercise performed during the workday can improve not only an employee’s mood but their work performance as well.

According to the study, employees that exercised during the workday reported:

A 21% improvement to concentration
A 41% increase in motivation
80% report better interactions with coworkers
27% report a greater capacity to handle stressful situations

The magnitude of these increases in self-reported motivation, concentration, capacity for stress and interpersonal skills is astounding.

We put these ideas to the test

Here at Effortless Admin we just had to put this to the test (although in a very non-scientific way). In the fall of 2018 a group of us began to taking small breaks to exercise throughout the day. These mini-workouts were typically short and high-intensity. We tried all sorts of different types of physical activity throughout the day, including:

Short, high intensity YouTube workouts
Pushup or pullup breaks throughout the day
Bring Sally Up challenges
Walks around the block

Other than body weight exercises the only equipment on hand was a door frame pullup bar and comfortable shoes.

Out of those of us that participated consistently almost everyone found that these short workouts increased their focus and productivity. It also didn’t take long to turn this experiment into a routine. Coworkers would encourage one another to take breaks and do a little physical activity before switching tasks. It’s been about 6 months now the group is still at it making sure they hit their pullup numbers for the day.

How to encourage exercise throughout the day

There are many simple ways that your organization can encourage physical activity throughout the workday to help improve employee satisfaction. Here are some great ideas to help you get your creative juices flowing:

Spearhead daily team walks
If you work in an office, be intentional about getting up and moving around every 30 minutes
Try some short, high intensity YouTube workouts
Take up walking, jogging, biking during lunch breaks
Start a push-up or pull-up club
Provide time during the day for employees to hit the gym
Subsidize local gym memberships

The key is to start simple and small. Foster a safe and encouraging environment and invite as many people as you can to participate. If you start an exercise club at your work, let us know how it goes @EAIncCanada.

Eligible HSA Expenses List

Thu, 21 Feb 2019 22:19:54 Z

A Health Spending Account (HSA) is a group benefit that an employer can make available to its employees to cover eligible healthcare related expenses. Qualifying expenses are governed by the Canadian Income Tax Act. Need to know if an expense is covered?

Checkout this handy table of eligible HSA expenses.

HEALTH EXPENSE	ELIGIBLE?	REQUIRES PRESCRIPTION?
Acoustic coupler		Yes
Air conditioner, filter, cleaner, or purifier (for persons with severe chronic ailment, disease, or disorder)		Yes
Altered auditory feedback devices		Yes
Ambulance service		No
Artificial eye or limb		No
Assisted breathing devices		No
Athletic or fitness club fees
Attendant care expenses (including nursing homes, group homes, respite care)		No
Audible signal devices		Yes
Baby breathing monitor		Yes
Bathroom aids		Yes
Birth control devices (non-prescription)
Bliss symbol boards		Yes
Blood coagulation monitors		Yes
Blood pressure monitors
Bone conduction receiver		No
Bone marrow transplant		No
Braces for a limb		No
Braille note-taker devices		Yes
Braille printers, synthetic speech systems, large print-on-screen devices		Yes
Breast prosthesis		Yes
Cancer treatment		No
Catheters, catheter trays, tubing or other products		No
Certificates completed by medical professionals		No
Cochlear implant		No
Computer peripherals for the blind		Yes
Cosmetic surgery necessary for medical or reconstructive purposes		Yes
Crutches		No
Deaf-blind intervening services		No
Dental services		No
Dentures and dental implants		No
Devices or software to assist in read (for persons with severe learning disabilities or the blind)		Yes
Diapers or disposable briefs		No
Diaper services
Driveway access		No
Drugs and medical devices bought under Health Canada’s Special Access Program		No
Elastic support hose		Yes
Electrolysis		No
Electronic bone healing devices		Yes
Electronic speech synthesizers		Yes
Electrotherapy devices		Yes
Environment control system (computerized or electronic)		Yes
Extremity pump		Yes
Furnace replacement (due to severe chronic respiratory ailment or immune system disorder)		Yes
Gluten-free products for persons with celiac disease		Certificate required
Health plan premiums paid by an employer and not included in your income
Hearing aids		No
Heart monitoring devices		Yes
Hospital bed		Yes
Hospital services		No
Ileostomy and colostomy pads		No
Infusion pump		Yes
Injection pens (such as an insulin pen)		Yes
Insulin or substitutes		Yes
In vitro fertility program		No
Kidney machine (dialysis)		No
Laboratory procedures or services		Yes
Large print-on-screen devices		Yes
Laryngeal speaking aids		No
Laser eye surgery		No
Liver extract injections		Yes
Medical marijuana (cannabis)		No
Medical services provided by qualified medical practitioners		No
Medical services provided outside Canada		No
Medical tests (such as electrocardiographs, electrocardiograms, metabolism tests, radiological services or procedures, spinal fluid tests, stool examinations, sugar content tests, urine analysis, and x-ray services)		Yes
Moving expenses (for persons with severe and prolonged mobility impairment, or who lack normal physical development)		No
Needles and syringes		Yes
Note-taking services (for persons with mental or physical impairment)		Certificate required
Nurse		No
Optical scanners		Yes
Organic food
Organ transplant		No
Orthodontic work		No
Orthopedic shoes, boots, and inserts		Yes
Osteogenesis stimulator (inductive coupling)		Yes
Over-the-counter medications
Oxygen and oxygen tent		Yes
Oxygen concentrator		No
Pacemakers		Yes
Page-turner devices		Yes
Personalized therapy plan		Yes
Personal response systems such as Lifeline an Health Line Services
Phototherapy equipment		No
Power-operated guided chair		Yes
Power-operated lift or transportation equipment		Yes
Premiums paid to private health services plans		No
Pre-natal and post-natal treatments		No
Prescription drugs and medications		Yes
Pressure pulse therapy devices		Yes
Provincial and territorial plans
Reading services (for the blind or persons with severe learning disabilities)		Certificate required
Real-time captioning		No
Rehabilitative therapy		No
Renovation or construction expenses to improve access (for persons with severe and prolonged mobility impairment or lack normal physical development)		No
School for persons with a physical or mental impairment		Certificate required
Scooter		No
Service animals		No
Sign-language interpretation services		No
Spinal brace		No
Standing devices		Yes
Supplements and vitamins
Talking textbooks		Yes
Teletypewriters		Yes
Television closed caption decoders		Yes
Therapy		Yes
Travel expenses (less than 40km)
Travel expenses (at least 40 km one way)		No
Treatment centre (for persons addicted to drugs, alcohol, or gambling)		Certificate required
Truss for hernia		No
Tutoring services		Certificate required
Vaccines		Yes
Vehicle modification (for persons with mobility impairment)		Yes
Vision devices (including prescription glasses and contact lenses)		Yes
Visual or vibratory signaling device		Yes
Vitamin B12		Yes
Voice recognition software		Certificate required
Volume control feature (additional)		Yes
Walking aids		Yes
Water filter, cleaner, or purifier		Yes
Wheelchairs and wheelchair carriers		No
Whirlpool bath treatments		No
Wigs		Yes

This HSA expense list serves as a summary of eligible expenses and is not exhaustive. It is subject to changes made to the Canadian Income Tax Act. For more information on the terms and conditions that apply to the various eligible expenses check the CRA’s website or talk to your advisor or HSA provider.

Expense list last updated: February 22, 2019.

(Mis)perceptions of the State of Benefits Admin Technology

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 22:54:09 Z

We live in interesting times when it comes to insurance technology (insurtech). According to cbinsights.com, in the United States alone, more than $2.56 billion has been invested in insurtech startups in 2018! Huge investments are being made in projects and programs to change an industry that has been traditionally dominated by manual processes and paper. Benefits administration (benadmin) in particular is one area in which tech investment is long overdue. Over the past few years the Canadian market has seen new entrants into this space as companies try to catch the insurtech wave that is rolling over the industry.

In spite of all of this industry investment, employers seem to be largely unaware of the fact that benefits management technology exists in the Canadian market that is specifically designed to streamline their administration and lower management costs. In fact, according to a recent study performed by HUB International, “more than 3 of every 4 respondents indicate that they are planning to implement one or more cost management strategies in the near future” yet, “only 11% of respondents plan to implement a new, or improve an existing, benefits administration technology platform or software solution.”

Companies are keen on implementing cost management strategies yet very few are considering software solutions as a means of controlling costs. Why is this?

The Technology Gap

Benefits administration in Canada, whether performed directly with an insurance carrier, through a TPA or managed in house, has traditionally been low tech. Very low tech.

Nowadays, however, many software development companies have started to invest in benefits administration related technology.

HR software companies, for example, often deliver some form of benefits administration module that integrates with their larger HRIS platform. These benefits admin modules typically streamline certain basic processes, but leave a lot of administration challenges unaddressed. These modules are often the least robust components of the overall HRIS platform. They may serve simple scenarios well, but as the complexity of the plan offerings increase so does the manual work.

Anyone who has been involved in employee benefits administration knows that it can get complicated. Fast. Administration requirements can change depending on:

the funding model (ASO, insured, etc.),
the plan design types (traditional, flex, etc.)
the type of products chosen (life, health & dental, wellness, spending accounts, etc.),
the employer’s unique policy contract requirements,
unique insurance carrier requirements,
collective agreements,
the list goes on...

It’s no wonder that benefits administration is still largely manual.

Bridging the Technology Gap

“While HR professionals are open to using technology, they might not yet realize how much technology has evolved and how it could help them to reach their employee benefits goals” (HUB International 2018 Benefits Barometer Canada Study).

With the inherent complexities built into benefits administration, it’s no wonder employers don’t plan on implementing new benefits admin technology. As HUB shows, employers are unaware of, and honestly may not believe there are, benefits admin systems that can handle their administration requirements. But there are systems on the market that are purpose built to solve these very real administration challenges.

Systems such as (insert shameless plug here:) the Effortless Admin platform. Technology that is designed to:

Simplify complex and error prone administration processes and insurance carrier requirements
Reduce liability through integrated policy contract compliance
Support the various (and changing) products an employer may want to offer to their employees
Eliminate duplicate data entry through integrations with insurance carriers and HRIS/payroll systems
Eliminate unnecessary billing reconciliation
Adapt to the unique reporting requirements of employers
And much more...

As of now, most employers are unaware that there are solutions to their administration challenges. This lack of awareness has caused many employers to settle for suboptimal solutions. The implementation of quality benefits admin platforms can very quickly lead to real tangible cost savings and increased flexibility.

How a TPA Lowers Administration Costs

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 22:22:07 Z

The true cost of an employee group benefits plan is more than the plan’s premium. The plan must be administered, and administration is a time consuming, inefficient, and costly part of employee benefits. Benefit plan admin is usually a process of never ending paper chasing for enrollments and other forms, while maintaining a wall of post-it note reminders of important dates as well as an excel sheet to cross reference against insurance company admin websites and invoices.

The inefficiencies of this process add up. For example, CFO.com estimates the following average day-to-day benefit plan admin costs:

$110 per employee enrollment
$13 per address change
$45 per salary change

These costs, while significant, are only small parts of the plan admin work, which also includes the monthly management of insurance company billing reconciliation and remittances.

Together, these costs add up to large, recurring expenses. This is especially true once you consider the fact that Canadian employers change benefit providers every 3-5 years on average, meaning that companies are re-enrolling all employees at $110.00 each two or three times every decade. (Not to mention the costs of marketing and quoting the company’s benefits package.)

There is a simple reason these costs are so high. Canadian HR departments have almost no choice but to work through the frustrating limitations of insurance carrier administration systems. These systems are often inefficient, and slow to change. As a result, a typical HR department will usually find a benefits plan supported by one insurance company to be an administrative challenge, and many companies have to pass on improving a benefit plan by adding additional benefit products from other providers simply because they can’t handle the extra admin burden.

Many significant liabilities likely exist in your benefit plan eligibility data. This is because insurance company systems require the HR professionals to manually make sure that data entered into them complies with the insurance company’s administration guide, instead of embedding the insurance company’s guide into the system to protect the users. This creates risk, and can result in careful HR professionals needing big delays for small changes. But in the end no one is perfect, and data entry errors happen from time to time, and insurance company systems aren’t built to catch these errors.

Read more about how the right TPA can reduce your liability here: The Liability Risks Hidden in Your Employee Benefits Data

Leveraging the right TPA can greatly reduce your administration efforts

Choosing the right Third Party Administration (TPA) platform can reduce administration costs and liability while increasing flexibility.

Using the right platform will reduce your organization’s day to day administration costs through built in administration process optimizations. Put simply, the right platform can end the paper-chase and eliminate the need for maintaining a wall of post-it notes or excel sheet reminders, and frees up HR teams to perform higher value work for the company. More specifically, a platform that can be used no matter what insurance company supports the benefits plan at a given time, and one that is designed make sure changes comply with current benefit plan rules, will save your company time and save money.

Common functions like enrollments, updates, and salary changes are supported by the platform to ensure compliance, reducing the time and cost of these tasks, while billing reconciliation can be largely reduced. Other common costs can be eliminated completely. Adding or changing insurance carriers can be performed with no administration effort on the part of your HR team. Carrier changes can often be seamlessly implemented no disruption to your HR team.

Look for a TPA that supports the ability to make employee changes right up to the last business day of the month at which time billings are automatically generated. This means no restrictions on when during a month you can change employee data which translates to little, if any, reconciliation. Not only that but the platform produces one consolidated bill regardless of the number of insurance carriers you leverage so you only have one bill to pay.

TPA’s are backed by support teams that provide your organization support in administration and your employees with advice on utilizing the benefits plan which serves to remove your HR/Administration team’s risk of providing false advice.

What is a Third Party Administrator (TPA)?

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 19:46:24 Z

For years, Third Party Administrators (TPAs) have been the norm in the United States. Their ability to knit together insurance carrier products to make best-in-class benefit packages while controlling costs, along with the administration and billing efficiencies they bring, have made them the obvious choice for managing employee group benefit plans.

Although TPAs have been around for a long time in Canada they have only recently started picking up steam. Traditionally, employers have gone direct to a single insurance carrier for their group benefits plans. As more sophisticated benefit offerings enter the Canadian market, the ability to piece together best-in-class employee group benefit solutions without increasing cost and complexity of plan administration has grown in importance. So how do you accomplish this? Enter the TPA.

Ok, so what does a Third Party Administrator (TPA) really do?

In its most basic form a TPA helps employers streamline and manage employee group benefit plans of any level of complexity. They take on the administration of your employee benefits plan and help to:

Lower your administration costs
Consolidate your management of all benefits into a single platform
Keep you in control of your data across carrier changes
Eliminate your billing reconciliation
Improve the accuracy and compliance of your data
Increase your plan design flexibility without increasing complexity

In conjunction with your benefits advisor, a TPA can:

Increase your access to the market
Help knit together best-in-class benefits
Leverage your data to assist your advisor in performing independent renewal audits
Provide your advisor with access to plan performance analytics

Now, not all TPAs are created equal, and not all TPAs offer the same set of services. When choosing a TPA it is important to ensure that they offer the platform and services that aligns well with your organization's unique needs. The right TPA will you save time and money and allow you to implement the right employee group benefits program for your organization.

What to look out for when choosing a TPA

TPAs come in all shapes and sizes.

Some TPAs perform both administration and claims adjudication. These TPAs use an insurance carrier in the background to insure risk and take over the function of paying claims. Other TPAs perform only administration and leave the claims adjudication to the insurance carrier thereby allowing you to work with the insurance carriers that are the best fit for your organization.

Some TPAs rely on largely manual process and third-party/outdated systems . Other TPAs have built efficient administration systems that are designed specifically for the Canadian market that take a lot of the manual effort of administration away.

These are just a few examples of some of the different services that TPAs offer.

Given the variety of services offered, here are a few questions to consider when evaluating a TPA:

How long have they been in business as a TPA?
Do they offer claims processing, or do the offer administration only?
Do they offer a modern multi-carrier administration platform?
What insurance carriers do they work with?
Do they offer demos of their platform?
Do they work with employee group benefit advisors?
What are their fees?
Will they work with you to streamline your administration processes?
Do they integrated with HRIS/payroll platforms?
Do they have a support team to assist your organization in the administration of your plan?

The Liability Risks Hidden in Your Employee Benefits Data

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 04:45:01 Z

Conference Board of Canada: "Employee benefits could not be more important to engagement and retention of an organization's workforce - or, in many cases, more misunderstood."

Administering even simple employee benefit plans can be complex and time consuming, and even simple administration errors or omissions can expose your organization to significant liability. These issues only get worse if you want to take advantage of leveraging multiple carriers in order to construct a best-in-class benefits plan.

Our research and experience finds that on average 14% of employee data administered directly with insurance carriers or through traditional third party administration providers has errors in it. These errors can be difficult to identify and can pose serious liabilities to your organization. For example, common errors include:

Missed enrollments resulting in no coverage and a possible reduction or denial of coverage when discovered
Missed terminations resulting in inappropriate plan utilization and the risk of increased rates
Incorrect disability benefit volumes which can result in millions of dollars of liability and associated legal fees
And many more...

Consider the following case study:

Mr. Bennet is a 35 year old male who was recently employed with ABC Company. Due to a simple administrative data entry error, he was not enrolled in the company benefits plan. A year later Mr. Bennet was in an accident and became disabled. His application for the long term disability benefit however, was denied.

At the time of his disability Mr. Bennet was earning $75,000 annually. If he remains disabled until the benefit termination age of 65 ABC Company may be liable up to a maximum of $1,500,750 in disability payout based on the benefit provisions in his policy.

This is only one of many examples of significant liabilities that can easily exist in your eligibility data.

Given the likelihood that many of these issues exist in your current benefit plan administration data...

How do you identify the types of issues that might exists?
How do you approach a data audit in a thorough way?
How do you prevent these liabilities from occurring in the future?

Performing a manual administration data audit is a big commitment and a time consuming process. Even with good processes in place this type of audit should be performed on a routine basis and quickly becomes too burdensome. However to do so manually, each line of benefit for each employee needs to be reviewed and confirmed by cross referencing the system data of the carrier supporting that line of benefit with the relevant provisions of that carrier’s administration guide and policy contract provisions for that line of benefit, and this information must also be compared against the company’s payroll and HRIS data to ensure proper class / division allocation and volume calculations.

So how can you stay on top of the integrity of your data in a way that doesn’t break the bank?

Effortless Admin specializes in performing benefits administration data audits that expose many of the contract compliance issues cited above. On average, we find that 14% of employees have some form of obvious inaccuracy in their data.

The majority of these data issues are corrected automatically when administering an employee benefits plan through the Effortless Admin platform due to its industry leading rules based architecture. Not only does this help improve the accuracy of employee data at the time of enrollment but it greatly improves data accuracy over time.

Going one step further and taking advantage of one of our payroll or HRIS integrations will also help reduce data transposition errors by removing any duplicate data entry required between your payroll/HRIS system and the Effortless Admin platform.

Talk to us about us about how we can help reduce your liability.

HR Tech Summit Debrief

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 04:28:08 Z

It’s been a busy couple of months since speaking at the 2018 HR Tech Summit in Toronto.

Our tech talk on Optimizing Employee Benefits in the Data Economy
was well attended and well received. We had a lot of great opportunities to connect with a wide variety organizations to discuss their benefits administration and data insight challenges.

The feedback we received was that most all in one HR, payroll and benefits administration platforms that exist in Canada either lack broad access to the insurance carrier market or offer weak benefits administration capabilities. There are so few solutions that robustly address the various challenges created by employee benefits administration that many HR professionals are resigned to time consuming and manual processes. This doesn’t need to be the case.

The Effortless Admin platform doesn’t try to be a jack of all trades. It is designed to provide standalone, carrier contract compliant, and easy to use employee benefits administration tools.

Choose the HRIS and payroll platforms that suits the unique needs of your organization and integrate them with the Effortless Admin platform to reduce time, cost, and liability.

Speaking of integrations, it was great to connect with various great HRIS and payroll companies in Canada. In particular, we enjoyed our time with BambooHR as we work together with them and their great platform on a turn-key integration. More to come on this in the coming months. ;)

If we don’t connect with you beforehand, we look forward to seeing you at the HR Tech Summit in 2019!

See you at the HR Tech Summit in Toronto

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 02:47:08 Z

We are pleased to announce that we are a gold sponsor of this year’s HR Tech Summit in Toronto on June 26 & 27, 2018.

Drop by our booth and say hello and make sure you join our Tech Talk at 1:35PM on Tuesday, June 26, 2018 on the tech talk stage. It’s on optimizing employee benefits in the data economy. You won’t want to miss it!

We hope to see you in Toronto!

Articles

A New Chapter: Effortless Admin is Moving!

A Move Four Decades in the Making

Purpose-Built for What's Next

We're Operational November 17

You're Always Welcome

Looking Forward

Admin Checkup: Evaluating Administration Models

Carrier Direct Admin

HRIS Benefits Module Admin

Third Party Administration (TPA)

Traditional TPA

Tech-Enabled TPA

Further Reading

Effortless Admin Featured on the Starting with One Podcast

2020 in Review

Remember 2018?

Fast Forward to Today

The Year of Digital Admin

Looking Ahead to 2021

Further Reading

Digitizing Employee Benefits Administration

Adapting processes to the future of work

Meaningful ben admin solutions

Employee Onboarding

Content Distribution

Automatic Re-enrollment

The solution highlights the problem

What if it existed?

Further Reading

Why Employers ❤️ Effortless Admin

Adopting a “Don't Make Me Think” Design Philosophy

The Book

The Application

The Examples

Business Card Design

Software Design

The Challenge

Increase Employee Productivity and Satisfaction Through Exercise (at Work)

Exercise at Work = More Productivity

We put these ideas to the test

How to encourage exercise throughout the day

Eligible HSA Expenses List

Further Reading

(Mis)perceptions of the State of Benefits Admin Technology

The Technology Gap

Bridging the Technology Gap

Further Reading

How a TPA Lowers Administration Costs

Leveraging the right TPA can greatly reduce your administration efforts

Further Reading

What is a Third Party Administrator (TPA)?

Ok, so what does a Third Party Administrator (TPA) really do?

What to look out for when choosing a TPA

Further Reading

The Liability Risks Hidden in Your Employee Benefits Data

HR Tech Summit Debrief

See you at the HR Tech Summit in Toronto