Sun Life provides you with a customized census template during onboarding to ensure that our team captures everything needed to set up your benefits. Using the customized template also means that you'll be able to take advantage of real-time validation when uploading your census. Onboard can help identify missing information or invalid formatting that could delay getting your employee demographic and enrollment elections information into our systems.
Included in this article:
Census template fields
The census template made available to you through Onboard is customized based on your benefit lines and employee groupings. The information noted as required will be based on your specific setup.
| Note: Clients setting up the Maxwell Health platform during onboarding will work with their Implementation Consultant to provide census information rather than uploading that in Onboard. |
At a minimum, you will be asked to provide:
- Employee demographic details such as SSN, first and last name, DOB, home zip code and state of residency, gender
- Dependent demographic information (if the employee is covering dependents)
- Employment details such as DOH, hours worked, work zip code and state of employment
- Billing location – how you sort or group your employees
- Earnings basis and amount (annually, hourly, weekly, etc.) - this should match the company information that you submitted
- Benefit deduction frequency
- Occupation
Other information that you may be asked to provide will be customized based on your benefits:
- Employees’ enrollment information (such as class, coverage tier, start & end dates, etc.)
- Smoker status
- If you have a DHMO plan, the DHMO facility ID will be required for all members covered
- If the employee is on COBRA
- If the benefit has volumes, please specify the volume per member
Completing the census template
You can download your custom template file by clicking on the link directly from the census task in Onboard. This will download an excel file to your computer.
You can manually add your employee and enrollment information row-by-row, or copy and paste information directly into the excel spreadsheet. Required information will be noted above the header for each column, and formatting tips are provided on the Instructions tab.
Please note: If you are adding new coverages to your existing benefit offering with Sun Life, only the new benefits need to be included on the template. These benefits will be noted on the task in Onboard.
Helpful reminders:
- If you are asked to enable or disable macros when opening your excel file, you can select to disable. The macro is an internal tool used to customize your template, but does not impact your ability to add information.
- Follow the instructions provided for how information should be formatted (i.e. social security numbers, dates, dollar amounts).
- Do not delete, move, or rename columns on the template - changing the format of the custom template will result in validation errors.
- Your column headers should be in row 6 of your template - validation will fail if it is not in that position.
- If you are copying and pasting into columns formatted with a drop-down menu, make sure the information mirrors the drop-down options.
- Do not delete or rename the 'Member Data' sheet in the Excel template - renaming the tabs on the sheets can cause the validation to fail.
- Remember to delete the row of sample data before submitting your census.
- Do not password protect your census file - password protected files cannot be validated.
- Important: Make sure your census is saved with the .xlsm file extension.
If you have specific questions on completing your census template, please reach out directly to your Implementation Consultant.
After you have completed your census, you will submit it to Sun Life by securely uploading it into Onboard. Learn more about uploading your completed census >>
| Note: Clients setting up the Maxwell Health platform during onboarding will not submit their census through Onboard. |