The Benecon Group

Financial Services
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Building a Custom Invoice Management Tool

For over thirty years, Benecon has been helping organizations set up and manage their own self-funded employee benefits cooperatives and consortiums in place of traditional benefits models. Recognizing that many employers have a large financial burden by paying fixed monthly expenses for insurance policies and other employee benefits, Benecon helps organizations develop and execute a strategy where premiums are replaced by payments for services as they’re used rather than in fixed monthly installments regardless of employee utilization.

The Benecon Group

Challenges

While Benecon is a leader in the self-funded space, they relied heavily on a combination of systems to help provide proper billing to their clients. Prioritizing transparency, Benecon seeks to furnish every client with three documents, providing a breakdown of the benefits used along with their associated cost. Additionally, multiple documents have to be shared with the AP, HR, and Finance departments for approval, and information would need to be collected from multiple systems that Benecon uses to manage its various employer benefit options to prepare these documents. Benecon had used some systems in the past in an attempt to streamline this process, but failed to find a solution that was tailored for their individual needs. 

Solutions

From the very beginning, it was clear that Benecon was going to require a custom solution to manage their invoicing effectively. With a self-funding strategy, it’s critical that Benecon know how many employees are utilizing a benefit at a given company and what the cost of that benefit is. That requires data to be collected and analyzed from multiple sources and aggregated according to the member of the consortium or cooperative to generate the individual invoice. Further, it needed to integrate with Salesforce, Netsuite, and the many other systems that are used to manage the individual benefit offering. 

As a consequence of this, the Hammer Dev team created a custom solution called BEDS to pull data together from Benecon’s many systems to generate the invoices. It organized customer data and gives a detailed breakdown of which customer employees are enrolled in what services, as well as what’s been charged for those services. Furthermore, the BEDS system enables Benecon to handle retroactive changes to policies as well as rate changes in individual benefit offerings. The result was a system that provided Benecon a way to charge its customers based on enrollees and furnish granular reports that could then be delivered to AP, HR, and Finance departments for every customer. 

Once these documents were prepared, Hammer Dev recommended and implemented a system in Box for delivering these documents securely to individual customers for review. 

Results

With the implementation of BEDS, the Benecon staff freed up valuable time to devote to serving their client base. The BEDS system eliminated the need to organize data pulled from a diverse array of systems and then create documents manually that could both give a breakdown of enrollee costs and could be shared securely with customers.  

In working with Hammer Dev to develop the BEDS system, the company’s leadership also decided to leverage Hammer Dev’s expertise for other projects that could improve the organization’s overall operational efficiency.