Upload or receive carrier invoices, work the exceptions from evidence, approve the invoice and the payment in two governed tracks, pay in batches, and post to your general ledger by cost center — inside Benefits Reimagined.
BR Carrier Billing is the module where billing operations, payables and accounting share one invoice record. Configuration sets the chart of accounts, the mapping from plans and wage types to GL accounts, cost-center split rules, variance tolerance policies and the close calendar. Billing operations then receive each period's invoices on the Invoice Workbench, resolve the exception queue against the covered-lives evidence, and accept or void each invoice. Approval happens in BR WorkFlow — once for the invoice, once for the payment — before payables transmits a payment batch, and accounting previews, posts and monitors the resulting GL entries with a dead-letter queue for anything that bounced.
"Most organizations pay carrier invoices on trust. A PDF arrives, someone spot-checks the total against last month, and the money goes out — while terminated employees keep getting billed, rate changes land a month late, and the difference between enrollment, payroll and the carrier's own records quietly compounds. Benefits Reimagined changes the approach: the invoice becomes a governed record that is reconciled from evidence, approved twice, paid in a batch and posted to the ledger by cost center — with a closed period that nothing can post into."
Follow September's carrier invoices from the chart of accounts that must exist before the first upload, through the exception queue and the two approvals, to the posted GL lines and the period close — exactly as the screens are worked.
The accounting administrator registers the external GL system and the per-company connection, loads the postable chart of accounts, maps benefit buckets to GL accounts and wage types to buckets, writes the home-to-target cost-center split rules, creates and activates a tolerance policy, and opens the first period in the close calendar. Every one of these rows is time-sliced with a start and end date, viewed as current-only or full history, and edited or copied into a new slice rather than overwritten. Structural changes — activating or retiring a mapping or split rule, a bank or GL connection edit — are staged as change requests that a second person approves.
A tolerance policy that is created but not activated changes nothing — and a closed period blocks posting, full stop.
History is never erased: deleting a mapping, account or split rule end-dates the slice, and the prior version stays on file for the auditor.
Billing operations selects the period — the same period the preview and posting screens use — and sees the KPIs, the reconciliation gate, the tolerance policy in effect and a pipeline of where every invoice stands. Uploaded invoices become invoice records with employee and dependent line items. The exception queue lists what the reconciliation engine could not clear; selecting a row opens an investigation panel with the evidence: invoiced member count, difference lines, reconciliation status, SLA state, reason code and the tolerance detail — never a fabricated match percentage. If an invoice number's fingerprint belongs to a different carrier, a lineage banner offers Correct carrier, and nothing can be accepted, transmitted or posted until it is.
An exception is worked from the difference lines and the covered-lives count, not from a score somebody has to trust.
Invoices are never hard-deleted. A void keeps the record, the lines and the reason, so a carrier that re-bills the same number is caught.
Accepting an invoice does not finalise it — it hands the invoice to BR WorkFlow for invoice approval. When the approver has approved, the invoice appears on the Payments screen, where payables operations sends it for payment approval: a second, separate WorkFlow track on the payment itself. Only after that approval can payables press Transmit, which creates the payment batch and its items and prepares the payment instruction. A payment can be rejected with a reason, an invoice with an uncorrected carrier lineage cannot be sent or transmitted at all, and the batches view shows every batch with its items and audit log.
Nobody in the module can approve an invoice or a payment — the approvals live in WorkFlow, with their own approvers and thresholds.
A rejected invoice comes back with the approver's reason and can be re-submitted after correction; it is never edited in flight.
Accounting operations opens GL & Cost Center Preview for the same period and sees the GL-account and cost-center rows the active mapping rules produce. A Draft simulation switch runs the same preview with the staged, not-yet-approved rules, so a mapping change is tested before it goes live and then activated through the change request queue. Post row or Post period writes the posting batch and lines — blocked outright if the close calendar says the period is closed or an invoice's carrier is still mismatched. The GL Posting Monitor lists every line with its status and retries failures; Incidents & DLQ holds the broader billing incidents, the dead-lettered postings, and a Revalidate active rules check that finds incomplete split sets and missing accounts before period end.
A closed period cannot be posted into from any screen — close is a fact in the calendar, not a reminder in someone's inbox.
Period-end order: Posting Monitor clean, no open incidents, rules revalidated, then set the period to Closed; late adjustments use Adjustment-only.
The evidence the exception queue is built from — who is enrolled, in which plan and tier, from which date, with which wage type — already lives in Benefits Reimagined. With SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and Employee Central Payroll it is present in real time. Where an entity is on Workday, UKG, ADP, Dayforce, Paycom or some other system, HRIS Sync populates the same canonical enrollment and payroll fields — IntelliMap shortens the mapping — and the reconciliation engine, the tolerance policy and the carrier lineage check run identically. The general ledger side is independent of the HRIS altogether: GL Config registers whichever accounting system the company posts to.
An acquired entity on another HRIS gets the same invoice controls on day one — not a second spreadsheet.
Hosted on SAP BTP or AWS, on SAP HANA or PostgreSQL — the platform enrollment, payroll corrections and analytics already share.
Ten screens in one sidebar — four for operations, six for configuration — each mapped to the record it reads and writes, and all of them sharing the enrollment data the rest of Benefits Reimagined runs on.
A period desk with KPIs, the reconciliation gate, upload, a stage pipeline, the exception queue and recent invoices — and a Lifecycle view of every invoice in any period with server-side filters, plus an Invoice Details screen for employee and dependent line items.
The reconciliation engine computes differences from line counts and amounts against enrollment, classifies them inside or outside the active tolerance policy, and shows the evidence — member counts, difference lines, reason codes, SLA — with no invented match percentage.
Every invoice number is fingerprinted against the carrier master; when the pattern and the attributed carrier disagree, a banner offers Correct carrier, and Accept, Send for approval, Transmit and Post stay blocked until the lineage is right.
Accept sends the invoice into BR WorkFlow; approved invoices are sent for a separate payment approval; Transmit then creates the payment batch, items and instruction on the rail Direct Billing shares — with rejection reasons and a batch audit log.
Time-sliced bucket accounts, wage-type mappings validated against the chart of accounts, home-to-target cost-center splits checked to 100%, a Draft simulation preview of staged rules, and a change request queue that makes activation a two-person act.
Open, closed and adjustment-only periods per company gate every post; the Posting Monitor lists each line with status and retry; Incidents & DLQ holds billing incidents, dead-lettered postings and a revalidation of every active rule before close.
The module is worked in four recognisable sequences — the first-time setup, the normal cycle, a safe change to a mapping rule, and the period-end close. Each one is a fixed order of screens, and each screen refuses to run ahead of the one before it.
Sequences from the module's working flow · a screen action that is refused shows why, and the earlier screen that must be completed first.
Most carrier invoices are checked in a workbook and paid through accounts payable with no benefits-side record. Here is what changes when the invoice is a governed record from upload to ledger.
| Moment | Spreadsheet audit or AP-only | BR Carrier Billing |
|---|---|---|
| The invoice arrives | A PDF in an inbox; someone keys the total into a tracker. | Uploaded or received into the Workbench as an invoice record with employee and dependent line items for the period. |
| Checking it | Spot-check against last month; a "match %" if the vendor's tool offers one. | Difference lines computed against enrollment, classified by the active tolerance policy, with member counts and reason codes as evidence. |
| The wrong carrier on the invoice | Nobody notices until the payment goes to the wrong vendor. | Fingerprint check flags the lineage and blocks accept, transmit and post until it is corrected. |
| Approving it | An email "OK to pay" from whoever is available. | Two BR WorkFlow tracks — invoice approval, then payment approval — with their own approvers and thresholds. |
| Paying it | AP cuts the check from the PDF total. | Transmit creates the payment batch and instruction from the approved record, with a batch audit log. |
| Booking it | A journal entry keyed by hand, split by memory. | GL rows from mapping rules and cost-center splits, previewed As posted or as a Draft simulation, then posted per period. |
| Changing a mapping | Edit the formula and hope. | Stage the rule, simulate it, submit a change request — a second person activates it. |
| Month-end | "Please don't post anything else" in a chat message. | Close Calendar — Closed blocks posting everywhere; Adjustment-only handles the late entry. |
The dashboard carries IntelliSuggest tips drawn from the period's invoices and exceptions, and the Athena administrator assistant answers questions from the same records — which invoices are still in payment approval, why a GL line failed, what the tolerance policy would have cleared. Athena explains and points; it does not accept, approve, transmit or post. Those remain administrator actions on their own screens and in BR WorkFlow.
Billing, payables and accounting share the same period selector, the same invoice record and the same reconciliation gate — no tracker to reconcile against the tracker.
An exception shows the members, the difference lines and the reason code; the decision to accept is made on facts the auditor can reopen.
Invoice approval and payment approval are WorkFlow decisions with their own approvers — there is no button in the module that skips either.
GL accounts and cost-center splits come from time-sliced mappings you can simulate before activating — the journal is a preview, not a memory.
Activating a mapping, retiring a split rule or editing a bank connection is staged by one administrator and approved by another.
The close calendar blocks posting into a closed period from every screen, and the dead-letter queue keeps what bounced until it is retried.
Carrier Billing is built for organizations paying many carriers across several companies and cost centers. Configuration is effective-dated and approved, operations is gated by evidence and by WorkFlow, and accounting posts only into open periods — so the same controls hold whether one entity or twenty are on the tenant.
Bring one period of carrier invoices and your chart of accounts to a demo. We will load the mappings, upload the invoices to the Workbench, work the exceptions against enrollment, walk one invoice through both approvals and a payment batch, and post the period to a simulated ledger — on the screens your teams would use.
Turn the monthly carrier PDF from a trust exercise into a governed record — reconciled from evidence, approved in WorkFlow, paid in a batch and posted to your ledger by cost center, inside an open period.