Consolidated invoicing brings all of an employer’s benefit plan invoices into one place and creates a single monthly invoice summary (learn more about consolidated invoicing and how it works). The process certainly removes the invoice collection headache for employers who use different insurance carriers for different employee benefit plans. But is paying for consolidated invoicing actually cost-effective? You may find that consolidated invoicing technology today does more than meets the eye.
Streamlining Manual and Repetitive Processes
For starters, it’s likely that different insurance carriers are not only providing invoices in different files and formats, but also through different delivery methods as well (i.e. traditional mail, email, online portal). Even with the convenience of today’s electronic billing, HR and accounting departments typically have to login to each carrier’s portal to retrieve their monthly invoice.
With today’s consolidated invoicing technology, taking the VerifiaBill software for example, each carrier invoice is imported and converted into a consolidated spreadsheet detailing line by line employee charges and adjustments. Within their online portal, employers can view the actual invoices themselves along with a single invoice summary that lists the total charges, invoice due dates, and remittance addresses.
This process results in time savings for employers, eliminating the need for collecting, downloading, or converting invoices, and putting all invoice payment details in one place. It’s common for many employers to combine their consolidated invoicing service with a carrier bill-pay service, allowing them to make one single payment each month for all carrier invoices – resulting in even further time savings.
Are there any other benefits from consolidated invoicing software services? That all depends on the software you use!
Auditing for Billing and Coverage Accuracy
Some HR tools like VerifiaBill go beyond the traditional consolidated invoicing services. Using the invoices that were imported into the employer’s database, the software produces a monthly Benefit Cost Allocation Report and Discrepancy Identification Report. These reports allocate every benefit charge to specific cost centers and audit invoices against the employer’s Benadmin or Payroll system data to identify billing and coverage discrepancies.
This combination of automated data and reporting results in massive time savings, reducing the monthly accounting processes for employers. In addition, these reports allow employers to easily account for every penny of their benefits spend, and to reduce monthly billing and coverage errors.
With today’s technology, consolidated invoicing tools like VerifiaBill seem to prove to be very cost-effective, especially for employers with limited HR teams and resources. Software like VerifiaBill can effectively take the employee benefits billing and accounting processes off your hands, and potentially even save you money along the way. There are a number of examples where the software’s auditing feature has identified hundreds of thousands of dollars in discrepancies for various employers.
If you want to streamline employee benefit billing and accounting, contact Beneration to learn more about VerifiaBill.