Time and Attendance - Time Management Systems

Category: Time and Attendance

27 Dec 2017

Why Long-Term Care Organizations Should Use TMS Attendance Enterprise

Long Term Care (LTC) organizations provide both medical and non-medical services to assist in meeting the needs of people whose self-care is limited. Workers provide both medical and non-medical care, and are subject to strict regulation. This results in the need for labor management that is both specific and accurate, keeping in compliance with federal, state, and local labor laws.

LTC organizations have several labor management challenges and priorities relating to these four primary personas, which are addressed by using TMS Attendance, helping ensure compliance, simplify budget management and generate an optimized composition of staff.

Ensure Compliance

Compliance is king. It is critically important for LTC organizations to monitor census and ensure proper staffing and care ratios. Most organizations still use spreadsheets to manage shift coverages, which can be extremely time consuming, cause inaccurate data, and lead to low CMS ratings.

Additionally, keeping a keen eye on employee certifications can be tedious, and if they are not properly monitored, can lead to penalties and put a halt to an employee’s ability to legally work.

TMS Attendance Benefits:

  • We provide a Monthly Census & PPD report that can automatically track coverage ratios and easily visualize where coverage ratios are below thresholds to highlight where attention is needed. 
  • Our system incorporates easy monitoring of employee certifications and visual cues to indicate employees who are approaching expiration to ensure action is taken.

Budget Management

Long-term care organizations rely on funding from Medicaid and Medicare, making it vital for a facility to remain on budget while simultaneously maintaining coverage requirements against census data. Capturing and reporting on direct care, non-direct care, and nursing staff hours can be a chore, and countless hours can be spent organizing shift totals to try and identify where changes are needed to help stay aligned with changing Census numbers. Additionally, shift changes and last-minute coverages can lead to increased overtime expenses if weekly hours aren’t closely watched. This can quickly drain your facility’s budget.

TMS Attendance Benefits:

  • TMS Attendance allows users to not only gain quick insight into direct and non-direct care hours, but users can also drill down into specific shifts, easily sort data and export the information to send to owners as needed.
  • We can help save time managing your budget by providing easy access to view where gaps or surpluses to coverages exist.  Intelligent decisions can then be made to reduce or add staff accordingly, and upon the need to add staff – avoiding scheduling employees who are approaching overtime.

Staff Management

Managing staff and attendance within LTC organizations has become increasingly challenging as the industry faces growing rates in absenteeism. For example, it is not uncommon to see absenteeism rates of nine to 10 percent for Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs). Legal and professional standards now say that those absent employees must be replaced to maintain the desired standard of care. This leads to coverage issues, directly impacting CMS | PBJ reports and ultimately a facility’s CMS rating. The time needed to keep up with reporting, varying shift premiums, and callbacks is a burden.

TMS Attendance Benefits:

  • If you have minimum coverage requirements and find yourself understaffed due to an absence, our schedule coverage, along with Seeker for absence management, helps ensure coverage levels are properly achieved and compliance is maintained!
  • Seeker can automatically generate pre-defined substitution lists that are FILTERED to remove unqualified employees and match only the replacements with the required skills for the available shift.
  • Eliminate the worry associated with generating and submitting PBJ & CMS 671/672 reports.  Our solution provides this data with the click of a mouse, no need to manually calculate, simply download the file(s) and upload to the CMS website.

Learn more about how TMS Attendance Enterprise can help your facility. Contact Monica at Time Management Systems by calling (605) 306-5529.

14 Apr 2017

Three benefits of using time tracking software

Managing time means getting work done. For your business, that means being productive and, as a result, more profitable. Time tracking software provides a helpful solution to making that happen—and takes some of the burden off your human resources professionals. Streamline your business operations with these three benefits of using time tracking software.

Cost savings

As a business owner, you know that time is money. By reporting how much time is spent, and on what, your employees provide workflow insights that can then help you answer questions and make profitable decisions.

For example, how long is each part of the production process taking? How long do we want it to take? And, if those numbers don’t match, where can we reallocate time?

Monitoring your employees’ time helps you more closely examine your work processes, find inefficiencies, and take steps to improve them. You’ll cut out unnecessary expenses that are costing you money and refine your production process to be more efficient.

As an added bonus, this saves human resources professionals the time and trouble of finding inefficiencies themselves. By having a time tracking software to do it, your HR staff can focus their time on other job duties.

Useful Reporting

When making investments, people want to know that what they’re putting in is paying off—and your customers are no exception. You’ll need the numbers to prove that your services are worth their investment, and time reporting helps you find these numbers.

Our time and attendance software provides breakdowns and summaries that illustrate where hours are logged by each employee. Given this data, you can define how long each part of a project takes and provide your clientele with more accurate estimates for a project.

These summaries can also show you how much time is spent on internal versus external work—a statistic that can help you make business decisions to balance that workload in the most profitable way. Tracking time and attendance ensures that you remain compliant with labor regulations such as the Affordable Care Act, FMLA, and FLSA.

Increased productivity

Defining standard times for your processes helps you set goals for the future. Putting a set number of hours to your processes monetizes them, which shows employees how important their time and work really is. This, in turn, helps keep your employees on track and encourages them to reach those goals.

By helping you set goals, time tracking software also helps employees prioritize their work. They can then determine what needs to be done when, and focus their time accordingly. The result is more productive workflow for you and more direction for employees.

Interested? We can help.

Managing time is essential to making sure employees’ work is getting done in the most profitable way. With time tracking software, you can do exactly that—without having to micromanage. Get in touch with us today to see how time and attendance software can streamline your business operations.

31 Jan 2017
ACA Reporting: Answers for Employers

ACA Reporting: Answers for Employers

Though Affordable Care Act in Flux, Deadlines Still Approaching

Given the outcome of the presidential election, many employers took a “wait and see” approach to the ACA. With deadlines looming, there’s a lack of clear-cut direction. In this post, we’ve provided answers to some common questions from employers.

Trump won. Didn’t ACA go away?

A key element of President Trump’s campaign was to repeal and replace Obamacare, and changes are likely to come. However, in 2016, ACA was the law of the land. Applicable Large Employers (ALEs), those averaging 50 or more full-time-equivalent employees in 2015, are currently obligated to fulfill reporting requirements for 2016.

What about the Executive Order related to ACA?

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order titled Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Pending Repeal. It directs federal agencies to use discretion “to the maximum extent permitted by law” in waiving, deferring, and delaying ACA provisions that pose a fiscal or regulatory burden, fee, tax, or penalty on states, individuals, families, healthcare providers, health insurers, patients, recipients of healthcare services, purchasers of health insurance, or makers of medical devices, products, or medications.

Employers are not specifically mentioned in the executive order, though it’s likely they are intended to be included. In addition, while it reinforces the intent to repeal, the executive order itself does not change the law. Furthermore, it remains unclear how the IRS may apply its newly-granted discretion to ACA filings. As a result, without specific notice by the IRS, prudent employers are still following the employee notice and filing requirements.

OK, so what are the deadlines this year?

March 2, 2017, is the deadline for notice to employees (most commonly a copy of the 1095-C). The deadline for paper filing of forms 1094-C and 1095-C is February 28, 2017. The deadline for electronic filing is March 31, 2017. Electronic filing is required for organizations submitting 250 or more returns.

What has changed from last year’s filings?

The good news is that the 2016 IRS forms and instructions are similar to last year’s. There are just a few differences:

Changes due to expiration of transition relief.

Some limited transition relief is still in effect for insurance plan years beginning in 2015. However, transition relief related to calendar year 2015 is no longer valid.

  • On Form 1094-C, line 22, box B is designated “Reserved.” Qualifying Offer Method Transition Relief is not applicable for 2016.
  • Code 1I for Form 1095-C, line 14, and code 2I for Form 1095-C, line 16, are no longer applicable and have been reserved.

New codes for conditional offers of coverage.

Conditional offers are subject to reasonable, objective conditions, such as an offer of coverage from the spouse’s employer.

  • 1J – An offer of minimum essential coverage (MEC) providing minimum value (MV) to employee and at least MEC conditionally offered to spouse, no coverage for dependents
  • 1K – An offer of MEC providing MV to employee; at least MEC offered to dependents; and at least MEC conditionally offered to spouse.

Affordability safe harbors.

1095-C Line 16 codes 2F, 2G, and 2H, which indicate that an offer of insurance was affordable, can be used only in months where coverage was offered to at least 95% of full time employees. Cross reference the months with Form 1094-C, Part III, column (a). You cannot use the affordability safe harbors during months where you checked the “No” box.

The forms are confusing. What if I make a mistake in the reporting?

As long as you meet the deadlines, the IRS has extended relief from filing penalties for errors made in good faith. This includes incorrect or incomplete information reported on the 1094-C, 1095-C, or statement to employee.  According to the IRS, no relief is provided for employers who “cannot show a good faith effort to comply with the information reporting requirements or that fail to timely file an information return or furnish a statement.”

If you don’t meet the deadlines or can’t show good faith effort, filing penalties are steep. A penalty can apply when the employee notice or IRS filing is late or contains errors. The penalty amounts shown below can be doubled if the employer demonstrates “willful neglect.”

Penalty TypeProvided/Corrected within 30 days of deadlineThrough 8/1/17After 8/1/17
Employee notice$50 per notice
Maximum $500,000
$100 per notice
Maximum $1.5 million
$250 per notice
Maximum $3 million
IRS filing$50 per return$100 per return$250 per return

Source

Of course, even if you file correctly and on time, you may still be subject to employer shared responsibility assessments, also known as ACA pay-or-play penalties (if your returns show that you didn’t offer adequate insurance to full-time employees and an employee received a tax credit for purchasing insurance). We’ll know more about that as details of any future ACA repeal are published.

18 Jan 2017
Paperwork

Understanding ACA Subsidy Notices

What are they, and what should I do if I get one?

As part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Department for Health and Human Services (HHS) sends ACA subsidy notices to alert employers of their employees’ qualification for premium subsidized health insurance through the health insurance marketplace. The intent of these notices is to ensure that employees who qualified for subsidies are actually eligible—not to accuse the employer of making a mistake. Identifying faulty subsidy assistance could save both you and your employee(s) in the long run.

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