Collection of the Payroll Transaction Data

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Collection of the Payroll Transaction Data

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Question: Is there a shortcut in the process of collecting the payroll transaction data? More specifically, if the company has offered affordable coverage and they have a stable workforce, how much payroll data is needed in the system?

Answer:

ACA requires employers to accurately track employee hours by pay period. At the very least an employer can bring in summary data on a month by month basis. This information would come from the company’s payroll system. It is important to know how many hours each employee worked in that month as it will affect the calculation on a standard and initial measurement period. Yearly totals will not work in the measurement periods. For the Lookback Measurement, you need transactional data for those that worked anytime in the filing year back to the beginning of the Standard Measurement Period that ends closest to the filing year. For example; if you are working on year 2019 and you have setup a SMP from 10/1/2017 to 9/30/2018, then data for the 2019 employees would need to begin at 10/1/2017. Again, all data must be either by the month or pay period
Ok, if you have a stable work force, meaning mostly FT employees and maybe a few that are PT but never work 130 hours in a month, you could eliminate bringing in any hours transactions. However, you will need to bring in your Health deductions/benefit (Type 2 or 3) for the employees who took coverage in the year of filing.

Health records are important as they tell who accepted coverage. These can be either by pay period or by the month and you will only need data for those who took the health insurance in the filing year. Others find it easier to do the export when other transactional data is ready.

** As of the 2017 filing year, the Cloud Solution allows the import of Benefit/Deduction Health Data for a Date Range. This is setup in Configuration in the Company Setup window. See below and refer to the Integrity Data ACA User Guide, page 60, for further details.