What is the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was issued by Obama in March, 2010 and requires all employers with 50 or more full-time, or full-time equivalent (FTE), employees to provide health care plans/coverage for their employees. If your company does not comply with Affordable Care Act regulations, you will be required to pay an “Employer Shared Responsibility Assessment”, or more commonly referred to as a pay-or-play penalty. Fines for this pay-or-play penalty can range anywhere from $2000-$3000 per full time employee and occurs usually when an employee receives a premium tax credit or cost-sharing reductions. This can be a result of your company not providing health care in general, or not providing health care that your employees feel they can afford. Below is an infographic to help your company see whether or not you are liable for employee health care and whether or not pay-or-play penalties apply to you.
Source: http://sagecity.na.sage.com/p/aca - Sage Healthcare Reform Survival Guide
How does Sage software comply and support the Affordable Care Act?
Sage helps your business tackle government regulations like the Affordable Care Act in the following ways:
Available ACA resources (collateral, website)
Sage HRMS:
Regular system updates to comply with regulation changes
Better tracking and management of employee benefit plans
An accurate payroll system that tracks ACA information on employees year round
Sage Resources and websites
Sage wants to make sure all of their customers are geared with the right tools to run their business, and that includes providing support and software to make compliance with government regulations (Like ACA) easy. Sage provides an ACA Resource Center support page that provides answers to any questions or concerns you may have about new Affordable Care Act regulations, how to incorporate ACA tracking into your Sage 100 software, and much more.
The benefits of using Sage HRMS to handle the Affordable Care Act
Sage also offers Sage HRMS, which provides easy to use tools to manage compliance with government regulations like the Affordable Care Act. Since government regulations are continuously being changed and updated, HRMS software is consistently updated to conform to new policy updates or changes. Updates consist of things like revised W-2 forms, employee notification of regulation changes, and more. This allows you to run your business worry-free, knowing that your Sage 100 system is ensuring your business is running in accordance with the law.
In addition, since the Affordable Care Act has become such a headache for HR business professionals, Sage has created specific capabilities within its HRMS software to manage all requirements within the ACA. Sage HRMS allows employers to track and supervise employee benefit plans year-round. This quick view of employee benefit packages allows you to review how much the benefit packages are costing your company and to which employees they are being assigned. This will help you to manage company costs and ensure that each employee is given the correct benefit package. Sage HRMS also helps employees with the benefit selection process. The software automates benefit packaging and provides online benefits enrollment functionality, which means employees can see and select which health insurance coverage they want to receive, all conveniently online. Lastly, Sage HRMS provides an accurate payroll system that tracks all information needed to comply with the Affordable Care Act regulations on a yearly basis. This consists of your payroll reflecting accurate tax rates and rules, in addition to automatically calculating health care costs and adding it to your W-2 forms when you are ready to print and submit. Just make sure to setup Affordable Care Act and W-2 forms in your Sage 100 system to assure the system begins tracking and documenting employee benefits for year-end submissions.
Save money, get a business management solution in place!
It’s important that your company follows the rules and regulations of the government, or it could end up costing your company a substantial amount of money in fees and fines. Make sure that you have a business management solution in place so that your business does not lose out on an opportunity to improve itself (business management solutions can make operations much simpler and efficient) and save money (since some business management solutions, like Sage 100, ensures compliance with government regulations). This will guarantee a smooth transition at the end of the year and keep your employees happy knowing that their benefits are being handled with care.
