Benefits and Enrollment

Benefits in Muin is three things: a catalog of plans with priced coverage levels, the enrollment windows employees may elect in, and the record of who elected what and what it costs them, with both cost totals shown per year.

When you would use this

You are setting up health, dental or vision coverage for the first time and need somewhere to hold the plans and prices.
Open enrollment is coming and you need a window with a start and end date.
A new hire needs to elect coverage outside the annual window.
Payroll asks what each employee’s benefit deduction should be this period.
You corrected a plan’s price and need to know whether existing enrollments changed.

Set up the benefits catalog

To open it: Sidebar → HR → Payroll & Benefits → Benefits.

The Benefits screen shows Plans in the catalog, People covered, You pay per year, Employees pay per year and the table of Benefit elections. Its subtitle is the whole scope: plans, enrollment windows and what coverage costs.

To add a plan:

Go to HR → Payroll & Benefits → Benefits.
Create the plan. Give it a name, a carrier if you have one, and a type.
Open the plan to price it. Click a plan row to reach its detail page.
On Benefit plan, add a row to Priced coverage levels for each tier you offer: employee only, employee and spouse, employee and children, family. Each row carries Employee pays and the employer share, as a monthly amount in USD.
Save. A plan with no priced coverage levels shows No coverage levels are priced yet and nobody can elect it.

A plan you no longer offer is Retired, not deleted. Retiring stops new elections and leaves every historical election and its cost on the record.

Eligibility can be scoped to an audience. A plan with no audience is open to everyone the plan’s own rules admit; a plan bound to an audience admits only the employees who match it.

Open an enrollment window

To open it: Sidebar → HR → Payroll & Benefits → Benefits, then Enrollment windows. The windows screen also has its own address so a reminder can link straight to it.

A window is the period during which employees may elect. There are three types, and they differ in who they admit, not in how they behave:

Window type	Who it admits
Annual open enrollment	Everyone eligible, once a year
New hire	A person joining, in their first eligibility period
Qualifying event	A person whose circumstances changed mid-year

To open one:

Press Set up a window on the Benefits screen, or open Enrollment windows and create it there.
Pick the type and the window’s own start and end dates.
Set the coverage start date. This is separate from the window dates - staff usually elect in November for coverage that starts in January, and closing the window does not start the coverage.
Scope eligibility to an audience if the window is not for everyone.
Move the window to open. An election is only accepted while the window is open and the current time is inside it; outside that it is refused with the reason stated, not quietly disabled.

At most one annual open-enrollment window may cover any given day. A second overlapping one is refused, and the refusal says so. A late joiner gets a qualifying-event window of their own, which is also the record of why they were allowed in late.

Closing a window does not cancel what was already elected. Elections stand; the window only controls whether new ones can be made.

See and manage elections

The Benefit elections table on the Benefits screen lists every contributing election: Who, Plan, Level, Coverage from, They pay, You pay and Status. Row actions are Activate coverage, End coverage and Cancel election.

Employees elect their own coverage from My Benefits in their portal. When nobody has elected yet the screen says Nobody has elected coverage yet and offers Set up a window, because an empty window is the usual reason.

A waiver is a first-class election with a reason, not an absence. A waived coverage and a coverage nobody got round to electing look identical on screen otherwise, and affordability reporting has to tell them apart.

Why a price correction is safe

Every enrollment stores its own employee-cost and employer-cost snapshot, taken at the moment of election. Payroll deductions and benefit reports are computed from those snapshots, never from the plan’s current price. So:

Editing a plan’s price changes future elections only.
An existing enrollment keeps what the employee was actually charged, period by period.
If you genuinely need an existing enrollment re-priced, end it and create a new one. That leaves both on the record.

What it affects

Payroll. The employee cost on each election is the benefit deduction amount. Open payroll from the Benefits screen goes straight there.
My Benefits in the employee portal shows each person the window’s remaining days and only the plans they personally qualify for, not the whole catalog.
ACA reporting. The 1095-C worksheet’s line 15 (the lowest-cost employee contribution for self-only coverage offered) is built from your benefit plans, your enrollment windows and each enrollment’s own cost snapshot. A plan with no priced self-only level cannot contribute to it.
People covered on the dashboard counts active elections, so ending a coverage changes it immediately.

When it goes wrong

“We could not load benefits.” The dashboard read failed. Retry. Treat it as unknown, not as zero plans.

An employee cannot elect and does not know why. Check three things in order: is a window open, is the current date inside it, and does the employee match the plan or window audience. All three must hold, and the refusal names which one failed.

“A second overlapping window is refused.” You already have an annual open-enrollment window covering those dates. Edit the existing one, or use a qualifying-event window for the person who needs a late election.

An employee elected twice. They cannot. A second attempt at the same plan in the same coverage period is refused rather than creating a duplicate. If you see two rows, they are different plans or different coverage periods.

A plan shows “No coverage levels are priced yet.” Nobody can elect it. Open the plan and add at least one priced coverage level.

Next step

Payroll operations - where benefit deductions land.
Self-service profile - the employee’s own portal, including My Benefits.
HR compliance dashboard - I-9 and the employment compliance picture.