Purpose

Flexible Benefits for Great Britain (GB FlexBens) incorporates three distinct funding schemes that allow your organisation to fund flexible benefit programs for your employees:

This section of the SAP Library for GB FlexBens outlines these three funding schemes in greater detail, providing information on the core characteristics of each scheme, and their application in GB FlexBens . The key features of each are also described, together with specific examples and scenarios relating to each type of funding.

*The Total Package Scheme is currently still under development and is not delivered as a functionality in the first release of GB FlexBens (Release: 4.70 Extension 2.0 and ERP 1.0 2004)

Implementation Considerations

The precise method by which you fund your Flexible Benefits scheme will largely be determined by the degree of flexibility you wish to give your employees when they select the benefits on offer. The No Additional Funding Scheme provides the least amount of flexibility, while the Total Package Scheme provides the most.

As well as opting for a particular funding method, you must also decide on the range of benefits offered across the broad spectrum of your employees. Once the scheme is in place, it is unusual for your employees to be treated differently. The whole ethos of Flexible Benefits is to standardise the business where benefits are concerned, therefore offering all of the benefits to all of the employees.

Fundamentally, it may be that you decide that the only difference between participating employees in your Flexible Benefits programme is the value that each employee has available to spend on his or her benefits. However, it is likely that your employees will be assigned to distinct benefits groups, with each group comprising a different package of available benefits.

The majority of organisations implementing Flexible Benefits allow all employees to participate in the benefits scheme from its launch. Some organisations may prefer to roll out the scheme to smaller parts of the business initially, before including the majority of the employee base. In this situation, the roll out is usually based on either geographical location of employees and business units. However, a Flexible Benefits roll out may instead be concentrated on certain grades, for example, on management and executive levels in the first phase.

Features

The value of the fund allocated to an individual employee is usually influenced by his or her salary, level, or grade in your organisation. The more senior an employee is, the more funds he or she will generally be allocated to spend on flexible benefits. The following represent common methods for you to calculate an individual employee’s fund for benefits selection:

Activities

In Flexible Benefits for Great Britain , you can assign a standard valuefor any of the benefits plans offered, if a No Additional Funding Scheme is in operation. The standard value for all plan options belonging to one plan must be the same within the configuration of the cost rule for the plan. The standard value is the ‘value’ of the benefit you provide to the employee before any changes are made by the employee during GB FlexBens enrolment.

For more information on the configuration of benefits plans in GB FlexBens, refer to the Benefits Administration Implementation Guide (IMG) under:  BenefitsAdministration Plans .

For the Additional Funding Scheme , this standard value must be zero. This is because as an organisation, you do not offer standard plans with standard values in this scheme. Instead, you allocate a separate flex fundfrom which each eligible employee funds his or her benefits choices.