Buyer's Guide

You have probably never bought software like EPRLive before—frankly, there aren’t many solutions like EPRLive. If you’re considering our benefit remittance solution, you’re probably using some combination of receiving paper and/or spreadsheets from employers and entering that data into a spreadsheet or Access database, and that workflow is causing some problems.

The paper-based method of receiving benefit remittance data comes with a host of problems, from inconsistent data to time inefficiency. But it’s a workflow that does mostly get the job done and has for a long time. There is certainly the possibility that you will start this buying journey and at the end you will throw up your hands and say, “I can’t decide! This is impossible! We’ll keep doing what we’ve always done, and I will leave this to my successor to deal with.” 

That is why this Buyer’s Guide exists.

Making this decision is hard. If you move from paper and spreadsheets to online reporting, it will require people to change their behaviors, and that can be REALLY hard. Some people will be afraid that using EPRLive will make their job go away. It won’t, but it will change their job, and that can be just as scary. 

Most areas do not fit that simple scenario. They have multiple fund offices, possibly for local and national funds, or often one TPA handles pension benefits while another handles Health & Welfare, and the local union handles their dues and JATC, and the contractors association handles their fees, etc. The TPAs might have fund administration software, but the smaller offices typically do not and have to figure out their own way to store the data. In these areas, we can see the problems with paper and spreadsheets magnify with every downstream office. Each one has to rekey data. Each one has to decipher the handwriting. Each one has to fix errors if they catch them. Each one has to validate (or choose not to validate) the data that they are receiving. Each one has to figure out their own process. While EPRLive works for any collecting and funding scenario, we provide the greatest value in the most complicated scenarios.

Questions to Ask Yourself

These are the questions we ask at the beginning of a demonstration of EPRLive to a potential client. They might be helpful to ask yourself before you even get to the demo stage:

• What does your current workflow look like? Make sure you understand what you are currently asking your employers and downstream offices to do. How many checks do employers have to write? Where do they send the checks? How many fund offices are involved?

• What are the problems you are trying to solve? Sometimes there is one big pain point, and sometimes there are lots of problems that have accumulated over time. What are the complaints of your employers? What are the complaints coming from your own office?

• What features are most important to you in a reporting solution? Prioritize the problems you just listed and think about how software might help solve them. Which features are deal-breakers for you, and which features are nice-to-haves?

Other questions that you might have on your mind:

• Is it worth the expense? Implementing new, enterprise-level software has a cost, and you should see value in the implementation expense. In our experience, there is a minimum amount of work to implement any new client, no matter how small, so for smaller areas the set-up costs can seem high. The good news is that set-up fees are more negotiable than ongoing subscription fees, so whatever provider you work with, don’t be afraid to negotiate.

• How much time does it take to set up? 3-5 months. There’s a minimum amount of time you should expect to take to implement software like EPRLive. In order to understand your area and any complicated pieces, as well as communicate with and train all users, a small-to-average or simpler area should expect to spend three months, and a large or more complex area should expect to spend five months. If you talk to a software company who says that they can have everything done in less than three months or that they need more than 6 months, you should ask some follow-up questions to understand the scope of the work on which they are basing that estimate.

• Are there any other alternatives? If you have a simple collecting and funding workflow, where all money goes to one entity who also administrates all your funds, your fund administrator’s software may already have the ability to import or collect data from your employers. If your fund administrator doesn’t have that ability, you might consider moving to a TPA who does, or updating your fund administration software if you have a captive fund office. 

• What kind of adoption can I expect? If you implement software but never promote it, your usage rates will not be great. On the other hand, if you encourage usage, you can get to 100% of employers using the new system. For EPRLive, well over half of our clients who use our full system(63%) receive all their employer data electronically, and the vast majority (over 94%) have less than 10% of their employer data still coming to them on paper. We have found that the difference is not usually in officially making electronic reporting “mandatory” for employers, and this is not always a politically viable option. We have found what makes the difference is our clients (potentially, you) making the effort to talk to and guide employers who are reluctant to try the software .Personally calling the payroll person for any employer who sends in a paper report and offering to walk them through the process right then is the best way to get them to change their process, and we find that once they have tried reporting online, they don’t go back to paper. That may seem like a dauting task, but you’re never alone in supporting your employers with EPRLive—our Support team is there to help them through each step of the reporting process.

Do you have other questions that you’d like to see addressed in this Buyer’s Guide? Email them to us via our Contact Us page!