Affordable Care Act (ACA) Compliance Made Easy

Jul 25, 2022
Featured, Regulatory Compliance, Time and Attendance

ACA compliance system

ACA Compliance for Your Small Business Clients

Your small business clients have ACA obligations. In today’s post, we discuss compliance solutions.

First, some background. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) (informally “Obamacare”), was signed into law in 2010. The act was designed to raise healthcare outcomes, diminish costs, and improve methods of distribution and accessibility.

Are all small employers subject to the ACA?

Any organization with over 50 full-time or full-time equivalent employees (FTE) must meet ACA requirements. As part of this, the company healthcare benefits must meet basic criteria.

If you have clients with fewer than 50 employees, you can help them understand how workforce decision today can simplify ACA compliance when the time comes.

WorkforceHub Helps Your Clients Comply With the ACA

WorkforceHub from Swipeclock offers a quick, automated solution for ACA compliance.

The first thing your clients need to know is how important it is to track employee time accurately. Hopefully, they are already doing that for payroll. Similarly, for ACA, business owners need to know who qualifies as a FTE or Full-Time Equivalent employee. WorkforceHub tracks hours to determine each employee’s status, whether FT or FTE. It also produces an electronic paper trail for accurate reporting. In addition, WorkforceHub creates a Work Week and Work Month report. These allow your clients to see employee hours per week or month at a glance.

Furthermore, WorkforceHub is a fully integrated HR system. This means timekeeping syncs with scheduling, timesheets and other functions. For example, when managers create schedules, they can see things like PTO and FMLA-qualifying time off.

What if my clients have employees whose hours vary and they want to keep them under the full-time limit?

The qualifying number of hours that determine an employee’s status as a FT or FTE is 30 per week or 130 per month. Therefore, if your clients want to keep an employee part-time, they can’t work more than 30 hours/week.

With WorkforceHub, your clients can set thresholds on hours worked and create reports to identify employee status.

5 Ways to Avoid ACA Penalties

To recap, here is your 5-point plan for small business ACA compliance:

  1. Determine your employees’ ACA status—Full-time or Full-time Equivalent.
    • Under the ACA, full-time is defined as working an average of 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month. In addition, a full-time employee must work more than 120 days in a year.
  2. Track employee work hours to the minute.
  3. Set thresholds on the number of hours employees can work.
  4. Keep accurate, auditable timekeeping records.
  5. Consult time and labor reports to see the big picture and spot trends.

As mentioned, Swipeclock has affordable HR software to make all of this possible with the ease of system automation.

What else do I need to worry about?

By all means, the ACA is only one of your small business compliance obligations. For a complete small business compliance guide, see our small business Compliance Checklist.

Contact Swipeclock for information regarding WorkforceHub UPGRADE TODAY

Swipeclock offers WorkforceHub, the powerful, fully-integrated HR solution that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and business.

WorkforceHub includes Time and Attendance, Scheduling, PTO Tracking, and Benefits Management. When you streamline and automate your workflows, you can decrease labor costs. At the same time, you can start focusing on improving your culture.

We can get you up and running with WorkforceHub quickly. Contact us today to request a demo.

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