Products and Services Update – Q3 2018

PrismHR wrapped up a flurry of activity relating to products and infrastructure in Q3. We’ve got lots to catch you up on in the Q3 2018 Products & Services Update.

Check out this preview video for highlights:

This quarter’s update has been designed to be easier to navigate and to access the information most important to you. Each topic now has its own web page, so it’s easier to find the information you want quickly. Click any of the links below to access your area of interest.

New Products and Features

Here are the most notable and exciting new products and features released in Q3. Read the Additional Updates section for more detail on all updates and enhancements.

PrismHR Onboarding Business Rules & Form Sets

There’s been a lot of excitement about PrismHR Onboarding since it was announced in June, and we’re pleased to announce some key new features.

Business Rules Library

The new Business Rules Library allows you to create a variety of business rules that ensure the correct forms are shown to the correct set of employees. You can create global business rules that apply to all your clients or client business rules that apply to a subset of clients.

Form Sets

The new Form Sets allow you to group your forms into sets for easy organization, such as creating a set of all your clients’ handbooks.

Read the release notes for PrismHR Onboarding 1.1 to learn more about these any many other new features. And contact your Customer Success Manager (or email csm@prismhr.com) to learn about the benefits of implementing PrismHR Onboarding now so you’re ready to onboard your employees immediately in 2019 with a faster and easier onboarding tool that’s more modern and mobile-friendly.

Benefits Enrollment Life Events Enhancements & More

In Q2 2018, Life Events functionality was launched with very positive response from customers. With the Q3 release, Life Events is even better with enhancements like allowing employees to upload life event documents, life event workflow types being added to the dashboard and reports, and the addition of all life and disability offer types.

In addition, you now have the ability in Benefits Enrollment to email confirmation statements, post disabilities that require EOI with visibility to the GI overage, and allow flexible spending plan eligibility to vary by benefit group. Read the release notes for Benefits Enrollment 2.10.0 to learn more about all the updates made in Q3 to Benefits Enrollment.

Manager PTO Approvals are now available in the Employee Portal. Using the new PTO approval dashboard widget and overview page, client managers can now easily and quickly approve time off requests right in the Employee Portal where they perform actions as employees themselves. It’s all in one convenient place.

Empower employees and managers with a modern HR self-service experience. Access the Quick Start Kit for step-by-step instructions and training videos to get up and running with the new Employee Portal.

Additional Updates (By Role)

In addition to the new product updates mentioned, PrismHR also released a wide range of other product updates, enhancements and fixes throughout Q3 that you can find summarized below.

Benefits

Check out the Benefits Enrollment 2.9.1 and 2.9.2 releases and the 2.10.0 quarterly release for many enhancements to Life Events, emailing employee confirmation statements, and more. PrismHR 1.11.1and 1.11.2 releases and 1.12.0 quarterly release gives you new one time HSA match feature code in system parameters and new special option in group benefit plans. You’ll want to look at the Employee Portal 2.2.2 release for employer benefit contributions. And be sure to review PrismHR Onboarding 1.1.0 as well as the employee changes enhancements in API 1.13.

Payroll

Check out PrismHR 1.11.1 and 1.11.2 including the payroll retirement contributions report feature. The PrismHR 1.12.0 quarterly release delivers mass change to employee pay groupsnew payroll version of gross-to-net-register report, and new employee pay rate report. Also check out Benefits Enrollment 2.9.12.9.2 and 2.10.0, PrismHR Onboarding 1.1.0, and the Employee Portal 2.2.1 release and 2.3quarterly release.

Risk/Tax Finance

Take a look at the PrismHR 1.11.2 release and 1.12.0 quarterly release which include workers compensation reportG/L accounting featuresG/L template and chart of account maintenance, and much more.

Implementation

Be sure to take a look at PrismHR 1.11.1 and 1.11.2 releases and 1.12.0 quarterly release which include mass change to employee pay groups, alert for approvals pending on payrolls, custom email template for invoices and much more. Benefits Enrollment 2.9.1 and 2.9.2 releases and the 2.10.0 quarterly release include Life Events enhancements such as allow employees to upload required documents and much more. PrismHR Onboarding 1.1.0 includes business rules library and form sets. Employee portal 2.3 includes ability to approve or deny an employee PTO requests, and you’ll find employee changesenhancements in API 1.13 and the ability to create and configure a new client in API 1.14.

HR

Check out the PrismHR 1.12.0 quarterly release which includes new payroll version of gross-to-net register reportprorate new hire hoursconditional rules panel on pay codes formreport class information updated in payroll and client reports and much more.

Sales

Check out Pulse Release 70Release 71, and Release 72 which include enhancements to sales forecasting using probability of close percentages, integrating with the Pricing Console so salespeople don’t have to update values manually.

IT

Be sure to read about the PrismHR 1.11.1 and 1.11.2 releases and 1.12.0 quarterly release which include field security added to payroll versions of reports, manager users listed in client security, alert for approvals pending on payrolls, custom email template for invoices, and much more. The Benefits Enrollment 2.10.0 quarterly release includes new substitution variables, download functionality added to benefits enrollment trade and much more. You’ll want to review PrismHR Onboarding 1.1.0 which includes export dashboard data and New York wage PDF mapping. The Employee Portal 2.2.1 release and 2.3 quarterly release includes single sign-on menu, field-level security, show or hide password, and user experience improvement in themes. The API 1.14 quarterly release also has a lot of value.

Additional Updates (By Product)

PrismHR Payroll, Benefits & HR

The quarterly release of PrismHR 1.12.0 includes alerts of any outstanding approvals that need to be managed before payroll is processed, and general ledger setup maintenance has been converted from HRP to PrismHR. There are also eight community powered enhancements from PrismHR Ideas including mass pay group change utilitycustom email template for invoicesHR action approval denied notificationsmessage template enhancements, and work location geocode overrides. Read the release notes here.

Updates made earlier in the quarter include payroll version of gross-to-net register reportstandard on demand unpaid employees reportbilling voucher data to the accounting G/L detail download report, and new 401(k) fields in Data Retriever. Read more in the release notes for PrismHR 1.11.1 and 1.11.2.

Benefits Enrollment

Benefits Enrollment 2.10 includes an enhancement for Life Events that allows employees to upload required documents, and alternate contribution plan rules now display properly in combination with risk factors or networks. It also includes new fields for disability plans with guaranteed issue amounts over the limit and many fixes. For more information, read the release notes.

Lots of other updates were made to Benefits Enrollment before the quarterly release, including offer type rules for life insurance and disability plans in Life Eventsworkflow filters in web enrollment configurationrequired documents for life eventsemailing employee confirmation statementslife event workflows added to dashboard and reportssetting up coverage amounts for life insurance benefit plans, and Guaranty Issue overlimit amounts for spouse and dependents. More information can be found in the 2.9.1 and 2.9.2 Release Notes.

Onboarding

PrismHR Onboarding 1.1.0, announced at PrismHR LIVE, now includes features to create business rules to conditionally display forms. The release also includes new workflow maintenance actionscustom form PDF mapping for the NY wage formsdirect deposit PDF, and a dashboard data export. More information can be found in the Release Notes.

Employee Portal

The quarterly release of Employee Portal 2.3 had several key updates, including the ability to approve or deny their employees PTO requeststhe option to collect the employees email during registration and over 30 other enhancements and fixes. Read the Release Notes for more information.

Before the quarterly release, there were several additional enhancements including single sign-on menufield-level securityshow or hide passwordPTO History, and employer benefit contributions. You can find more information in the Release Notes for 2.2.1 and 2.2.2.

API

API 1.14 updates include the ability to create and configure a new client (SMB)enroll an employee in benefits and access custom fields for location and employee. There are also enhancements to the new hire and W4 services. For more information please view the Release Notes.

Before the quarterly release, API 1.13 updated Employee, Payroll, Security and other changes. The Upgrade Kit and Release Notes are available in the Customer Resource Center.

Pulse

Release 70Release 71, and Release 72 include several key updates and enhancements, including a more flexible email template systempersonalized dashboard searchesOSHA case number added to OSHA 300 report, and much more.

HRPyramid

HRPyramid Cloud 14.2 Service Pack 17 includes a wide range of fixes. Read the complete list of fixes in release notes for 14.2 SP1714.2 SP 16.1, and 14.2 SP 16.2.

Security Update

NAPEO recently announced that a number of PEOs have reported an increase in payroll fraud attempts. The recent scheme has been reported to work as follows:

  1. A fraudulent client (who will appear to be legitimate) signs on and runs a pay card payroll.
  2. This fake client provides a FEIN and in at least one case passed a credit check, but the ACH on the first payroll came back as “insufficient funds” and the client was nowhere to be found.
  3. In another case, the fraudulent client ran 2 small payrolls, then got a ‘big client’ and had to hire 40+ people immediately and pay them (all on pay cards). This is the payroll that bounced.

A fraudulent client could potentially have some or all of the characteristics below:

  • You have never met the client in person, and only communicated with them by phone or email.
  • When an in person meeting is requested, the client may get agitated.
  • They are ‘in a hurry,’ are ‘simple’ to set up, will aggressively push back on wire transfers for funding and will be impatient during the setup process.

Please be on alert that this is occurring, ensure that your team is aware of these attempts, and let your local/state/federal law enforcement agencies know if you have experienced payroll fraud.

PrismHR treats the security of the platform and your data that resides in it with the highest priority. You can find further information on security-related best practices in this article in the CRC.

Compliance

W4

In June, the IRS released a proposed new W4, aimed at establishing a withholding paradigm that aligned better with the income tax code alterations from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Initially, these changes were pegged for finalization by January 2019. However, after significant payroll industry pushback, the IRS recently pulled back the reins on these changes, delaying implementation until 2020. You can read more from the IRS here.

The Employee Portal team is targeting mid 2019 for functionality that will allow employees to complete / update their W4s via the portal, post onboarding. This will streamline and simplify the process in time for what may be a surge of existing employees looking to make an update using the new format.

Compliance Product Influencer Group

The aim of the Compliance team is to proactively handle regulatory changes. The team relies on user feedback and experiences to help shape product roadmap and development priorities. To that end, the compliance product influencer group has been established. Members of this group can expect regular communication from the compliance team, as well as share feedback on any compliance based development to help us prioritize and build the best possible compliance solutions.

If you are interested in joining the Compliance Product Influencer group, please email Chris Babigian at cpbabigian@prismhr.com.

In addition to influencer group communication, be on the lookout for other avenues of communication from the compliance team, including via postings to the PrismHR blog. Read the most recent posting regarding the Affordable Care Act.

Partnerships

New Partnership between PrismHR and Kurensē

PrismHR is pleased to announce a new partnership with Kurensē, a leading financial payments technology company that provides HR service providers a no-cost payroll card solution that’s easy for clients to implement. This new partnership will make it easy for PrismHR customers to streamline delivery of payments and reduce payroll costs while offering employees a faster, more convenient way to receive their pay. More information about this partnership will be coming soon, but if you have questions in the meantime, contact your Customer Success Manager or email csm@prismhr.com.

PrismHR Announces Insurance Alliance

PrismHR announced at the recent NAPEO Annual Conference and Marketplace the new PrismHR Insurance Alliance. The Insurance Alliance will combine leading insurance products and services with PrismHR technology, streamlining administration for HR service providers. The new approach will help PrismHR customers drive worksite employee engagement, satisfaction and growth. Initial partnerships will include a leading benefits enrollment company, Bentec Workplace Solutions, and a newcomer to the dental and vision insurance space, Beam Dental. Read the full press release here.

PrismHR LIVE

PrismHR LIVE 2019 Registration is Open

Registration is now open for PrismHR LIVE 2019! Don’t miss out on the HR service provider industry’s biggest technology conference, gathering hundreds of PEOs and ASOs to discuss best practices and how-tos for improving productivity and efficiency. Take advantage of the Super Early Bird rate of $1445 before it expires December 31st. Don’t miss your chance to join hundreds of PEO and ASO industry leaders in Boston!

Have an idea for a presentation? Submit your topics here. We are looking for industry leaders to share best practices, how tos, and insights with their peers.

Want to help shape the content and agenda of PrismHR LIVE 2019? Join the PrismHR LIVE Client Advisory Committee – we want your ideas and input! Contact us at events@prismhr.com, finalists will be contacted directly.

Customer Support

Year-End Webinar – November 29

To help your team prepare for year-end processing, we will offer a webinar to review best practices for setting up and processing W-2s and 1099s, and to provide tips on troubleshooting common issues. Anyone is welcome to attend, whether you’ve never processed W-2s and 1099s in HRP or Prism or even if you’re just looking looking to dust off those skills from prior years.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

  • Initializing Employee W-2 Forms and 1099s
  • Reporting W-2 Boxes, including Benefits
  • Balancing and auditing W-2 and 1099s
  • Making adjustments to W-2s
  • Ordering W-2 forms
  • Printing and aligning W-2 forms
  • Creating EFW2 Files

Additionally, the PrismHR team will also be compiling a video of common problems that are seen during year- end processing and how to troubleshoot those issues. This video will be made available shortly after the Nov. 29 webinar (exact date TBD).

Customer Success

We are continuing to build out the Customer Success program and recently welcomed two additional customer success managers (CSMs) to the team. CSMs a sole mission is to make you happy and successful on our platform. They don’t have a sales quota to meet. CSMs will serve as your primary points of contact at PrismHR to help with any questions or requests you may have. If you haven’t yet met your CSM, our new team members will be reaching out in the coming weeks.

Customer Resource Center

We continue to invest in building out the CRC. Here are the latest updates:

Once logged into the CRC, you will notice the login arrow in the upper right corner with your name. Clicking on your name will bring up 2 new options for “My Profile” and “My Account”. The “My Profile” page allows you to update your name, title, and phone number. On the My Account page, you will find contact information for your Customer Success team, as well as information about your account, such as what server you are hosted on, your Cloud Name and Account ID (used for API integrations).

On your “My Open Cases” and “My Closed Cases” views on the CRC, you will now see a field called “Engineering Status”. The purpose of this field is to offer a little more visibility into the status of any of your cases that have been sent to our Engineering team. The statuses that will display here are “In Development” (In Dev), “Not in Development” (Not in Dev), “Development Complete” (Dev Complete), “Released”, and “No Plan to Fix”. As an FYI, the Priority and Internal Tracking number fields can still be seen by scrolling to the right using the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen.

Have any CRC-related feedback to share, or any suggestions on other enhancements you’d like to see? Let us know at crcfeedback@prismhr.com.

Professional Services

Best Practices Consulting

Best Practices Consulting

Preparing your business for its next phase can be a complex undertaking, especially without an experienced partner. Through a partnership with McHenry Consulting, you can now get personalized recommendations on how to grow your business and improve operational efficiency from one of the leading advisors in the PEO industry, Dan McHenry. Learn more about Best Practices Consulting.

Updated Courses for PrismHR Training

New courses have been added to the Learning Management System on PrismHR Hiring. These include, a Quick Tour, How to Customize and Design PrismHR Hiring, How to Post Jobs and How to Use the Dashboard and Applicant Grid.

Sales and Marketing

Are you a member of the PrismHR SEEDS program? SEEDS gives you sales and marketing resources to help make it easier to market and sell PrismHR technology. Sign up or login.

The latest resources in SEEDS:

Tired of setting up and logging into your demo accounts for quick prospect demos? There’s an easier way to show the PrismHR technology that powers your services. The Clickable Demo makes it easy to show prospective customers employee and manager functionality without ever needing to login to the platform. Learn more and try it out in the SEEDS portal.

Has your organization upgraded to the new Employee Portal? If you need help getting the process started, be sure to check out the Employee Portal section in the product area of the quarterly update. The resources in SEEDS can help you show clients the value of the new employee and manager technology. From the Employee Portal datasheet to the demo video and clickable demo, all of the resources are designed to help you.

And, once you move to the Employee Portal, you can take advantage of the employee experience video. See below for more details.

Providing a great employee experience is more important than ever. With this new video resource you can show prospective clients how your technology and services can enhance their employees’ experience while alleviating many of their HR-related challenges.

This video was created in partnership with The Starr Conspiracy to offer you a customized video with your logo and branding without needing in-house expertise. Watch the video and learn how to get it customized for your company.

Events

PrismHR attended key NAPEO events in Q3:

CFO Seminar

July 11-13, 2018

Chicago, Il

PrismHR attended CFO Seminar and presented at the Technology Showcase. The Technology Showcase was a new program this year and PrismHR presented on what’s new in PrismHR technology.

Annual Conference and Marketplace

September 5-7
Phoenix, AZ

This year’s event provided many educational sessions and networking time in the Marketplace.

Billboard Block

Here are some areas where PrismHR will be focusing in the short term (fourth quarter of 2018) as well as an outline of our core initiatives for the longer term future:

PrismHR

Short Term

  • Import One-Time Deductions in PrismHR
  • Year-End Processing Enhancements
  • Advanced Employee Location Services
  • Convert Allocated Tip Handling/Reporting to PrismHR
  • Convert New Hire Reporting to PrismHR

Long Term

  • Convert Retro-Pay Calculator to PrismHR
  • Improve Payroll Notes
  • Extra Check Handling Enhancement
  • Retro PTO Handling
  • Pay Calculator Enhancements
  • Added Import Functionality

Onboarding

Short Term

  • Rehire Onboarding
  • Pay Card
  • PDF Stored for Employee Information and Self Identity
  • Data Issue Messages
  • Dashboard Reminders

Long Term

  • Workflow Maintenance – Proxy
  • Custom Form Mapping (Customer Provided PDF)
  • PDF Stored for All Custom Forms
  • Cross Hire
  • Spanish
  • Batch PDF Download
  • Kiosk
  • Workflow Library – Submit by Category
  • E-Verify

Employee Portal

Short Term

  • Estimate future PTO (employee and manager)
  • Rooftop address support using Symmetry integration
  • View/Reprint 1099
  • Supporting Life Events (Benefit Enrollment)
  • Viewing Employee’s PTO and Pay
  • Employee Portal setup checklist guides

Long Term

  • Support for Symmetry Tax Forms
  • Managers can edit Employee Information
  • Select HR Actions
  • Redesign direct deposit

Compliance

Short Term

  • Baseline NY minimum wage “Rule engine” functionality
  • California Flat sum bonus support
  • Quarterly Express Plus 940 and 941 integration, including Schedule R
  • W2 and ACA updates

Long Term

  • Build out minimum wage engine and logic for 50 state support
  • Garnishment enhancements, including priority order adjustments
  • W2 printing enhancements
  • Support for new W4 in 2020

Reporting

Short Term

  • Create reference guide for Vision Check Stubs
  • Payroll Variance Report (HRP Legacy Conversion)
  • Update YTD Totals on Payroll Register
  • Continue work to roll out new Interactive Reports

Long Term

  • Convert Legacy HRP reports to Interactive Reports
  • Convert Check Stub and Allocation screens in HRP to PrismHR
  • Payroll Register Enhancements
  • Invoice Approval Screen Enhancements
  • New Home Page and Reporting Navigation
  • Add Reports to Payroll Approval and Auto Gen Lists
  • Update Design of Header, Footer, and Body of most widely used Standard On Demand Reports

Benefits Enrollment

Short Term

  • Qualifying life events – employee portal initiated
  • Gender and Tobacco Banded plans
  • Critical illness setup as life insurance
  • Age reduction life plans (BE compatibility)
  • Multiple bugs

Long Term

  • Plan dependencies (including FSA/HSA only OE and HSA w/o Medical)
  • Current Enrollment Form revival
  • Notification enhancements
  • Take-on client tools
  • Enrollment applications
  • Client benefit renewal process

Pulse

Short Term

  • Sales Activity Management
  • Profitability Reporting/Scorecard
  • Continue Sunsetting ClientSpace Classic
  • More Prism Event Notifications

Long Term

  • Case Creation From Prism Employee Portal
  • Sense Architecture Redesign
  • Benefits Integration with Prism (Get Started)

API

Short Term

  • API calls to help the automation of client creation
  • API services for basic employee benefit enrollment
  • Better integration with Marketplace partners
  • A framework for the next generation of our API

Long Term

  • Full OAuth2.O support
  • A domain Driven, RESTful API
  • Full support for Prism security in the API (what employees each user is allowed to access)

*These roadmap statements represent PrismHR’s current intentions. PrismHR development plans are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Any reliance on these statements is at the relying party’s sole risk and will not create any liability or obligation for PrismHR.

Do you have something you’d like to see in future updates? Please let us know at more@prismhr.com, and stay tuned for next quarter’s update!

See previous PrismHR Product and Services Updates: