We are excited to announce our first major release of the year! It boasts a fresh new look and features significant navigation improvements that ensure you can easily and quickly complete all the various tasks Flock helps you with every day. Along with user experience updates, this release introduces more robust support for managing COBRA and retired employee benefits, syncing payroll calendar dates with your payroll provider, and much more. As always, our focus is on helping you—our broker partners, company administrators, and employees—get your work done swiftly and effectively. We’re dedicated to making your life easier!
Note: These feature updates will be live on the Flock App starting 02/10/2020.
We’ve improved your user experience with an intuitive, modular and more accessible side navigation and a lot more personalization options. The design goals for these changes are:
Continue reading to learn about the rest of our new product release features. See this blog post to learn more about our new look.
The employee's offboarding flow is now even more thorough and streamlined. Admins can now reassign any pending off-boarded employee’s tasks and designate new owners for onboarding/offboarding checklist items, as well as determine the employee’s COBRA/Retiree eligibility. If the off-boarded employee is a manager, a new manager can be assigned to the reportees.
Payroll deductions will be a lot more accurate with the new payroll calendar support. By loading your payroll calendar with deduction preferences such as cut-off dates and pre/post cycle deduction, Flock will be able to tell the exact payroll deduction start date and tell exactly how many pay cycles remain for the rest of the plan year. This is especially helpful for the HSA and FSA elections as well as our Payroll partner integrations.
We know this may sound complicated, but we make it simple with a step by step guide on how to get this set up in our support knowledgebase. We have more exciting functionality coming here such as per plan deduction schedules so stay tuned.
With the new government regulation changes for the 2020 W4, Flock has made systemwide updates to meet these requirements in the first week of January. Please note the major changes to the form include no longer reporting individual withholding amounts.
With this release, we’ve simplified the Change Eligibility Group flow. These changes give both Admins and Brokers a single place to capture and review all eligibility related changes in one place and capturing a changing reason. The new flow allows you to modify the benefits effective date, choose from a list of change reasons, and update any employment changes related to this event so that the employee’s profile is accurate. For our broker portal users, it also saves a lot of extra clicks by making it directly available from the benefits summary page.
We have added an email notification trigger whenever there is any change in an employee’s eligibility group. This will be enabled by default. The email announces and identifies the employee’s switch in the eligibility group, as well as their new effective date.
Enrollment extensions are a lot more simple and intuitive with our latest updates. Extend enrollments in the context of the relevant enrollment you are currently viewing so it's a lot more intuitive for the admin. Also, we have made it a lot more clear when an employee has been given an extension.
HR Admins and Brokers now have the ability to update employee enrollments with an Admin Override flow. This feature allows you to make necessary updates to enrollment without requiring employee form signatures or beneficiary / PCP information. Admins can also bypass any plan elections restrictions under QLE rules with this option.
For more information contact support@helloflock.com.
In case you missed our November 14, 2019 release, please click here.