How to check your group health bill against your roster

Group health invoices are easy to pay and hard to read. The total looks close to last month’s, so it gets approved. Meanwhile an employee who left in the spring is still on it, or a spouse was added at the wrong tier, and you keep paying for it every month.

A monthly bill check catches these before they stack up. After the first couple of months it becomes a short, routine job. Here’s how we do it.

What you need

• The carrier invoice, ideally the member-level detail rather than the summary page
• Your current roster: who is enrolled, in which plan, at which tier (employee only, employee plus spouse, employee plus children, family)
• The rate sheet for the current plan year

Go line by line

For each person on the invoice, check that they’re still employed and enrolled, that the tier matches what they elected, and that the premium matches the rate sheet for that plan and tier. Then go the other way and check that everyone on your roster shows up on the invoice. People missing from the bill are often people missing from the plan.

The errors that come up most

• Former employees still billed. The termination never reached the carrier, or it did and wasn’t processed.
• Wrong tier. Someone added or dropped a dependent and the bill didn’t change, or it changed to the wrong tier.
• New hires missing. This is the expensive one. A missing premium usually means a missing enrollment.
• Old rates after renewal. The first invoice of a new plan year doesn’t always pick up the new rates.
• Retro adjustments nobody can explain. Ask for the member-level detail behind any credit or charge before you accept it.

Fix it quickly

Carriers limit how far back they’ll credit a termination, so ask yours what the window is and send corrections the same month you find them. Keep a short log of each one: what was wrong, who you contacted, the date, and the date the credit showed up. That log makes next month’s check faster and settles arguments at renewal.

BenefitsDock does the comparison for you. Load the carrier invoice and it lines it up against your roster and elections, then flags every row that doesn’t match so you only look at the exceptions.