Once a MEWA is running, much of the plan manager’s work is repetitive and rule-governed. Mewa.io automates that part and hands the judgment to a person. Higher throughput, better accuracy, and far less manual work to pay for.
Illustrative, a working part of the platform. We walk you through the live view on your own plan.
It starts with the register: expected and billed premium, by employer, by plan and by coverage month. That is the plan’s claim on its participating employers, stated before anyone asks what the carrier billed for it. Everything after it is a comparison against that number.
A manual plan manager keeps the census in one place and the money in another, enrollment in the carrier’s portal, premium and claims in spreadsheets or a general ledger that never sees who is covered, and a person holds the two in agreement by hand. Mewa.io computes the premium from the enrollment itself. What the plan is owed for a coverage month is derived from who was covered in it, at the rates the plan charges, so the two cannot drift apart: the day an employer terminates, the coverage that should stop and the premium that should stop being charged are already the same record.
That figure is then checked against what the carrier billed, per employer and per coverage month, as the feeds arrive, so a difference is raised the same day.
That figure is also what the trust’s books recognize as contributions, since revenue belongs to the coverage month it was earned in, and the carrier’s monthly settlement is reconciled against the bank behind it. Every filing, count and report is read straight off that book, so the numbers on the return are the numbers in the ledger, not a second set assembled to match it.
Illustrative, a working part of the platform. Five participating employers of thousands, for one coverage month.
Once a MEWA is running, most of the work is rule-governed. The engine settles what the rules can settle, as each record arrives, and routes the rest to a person. See the full calendar →
834 transactions and proprietary formats, mapped per carrier.
Rules engine
Checks & routes on arrival
Applied to the register
Settled by rule, posted with no one touching it.
Raised for a person
Anything judgment has to settle.
A termination arrives with a clear reason
The continuation category is determined, federal or state, and the event is sent to your continuation administrator. Nobody is asked anything.
A termination arrives ambiguous
It stops, and one short question goes to the employer. Nothing follows from it until the answer does.
A member turns 65 at an employer under the threshold
The Small Employer Exception is prepared for the employer to sign.
A 5500 is still missing data
Chased from the employer automatically, on its own schedule.
Four of many. The rest we walk through on your own plan.
The rules settle what is unambiguous. Everything else is an exception, and an exception has a name, a reason and a person attached to it.
An exception is anything the rules cannot settle on their own: a termination with an unclear reason code, an enrollment that contradicts the prior record, a dependent aging out on a date the census does not support. Each one goes to a person, and where only the employer can settle it, the employer is asked.
The people who settle them are the in-house team that built the system, with outside ERISA counsel on the calls that turn on judgment. Your carrier, auditor, actuary and continuation vendor are untouched →
A filing is only as good as the books behind it. Each month is closed on its own, and every difference carries its reason.
Reconciliation raises the exceptions as the feeds arrive. Closing the month is what answers them: every open item is settled against a later file, settled by payment, or settled by a decision that has to carry its reason. Nothing can be quieted without a record of why, because that record is what the plan is later asked to stand behind.
What comes out is a variance statement: what moved, by how much, against which coverage month, and what came of it. It is a claim about a position on a date, so it can be checked later against what was believed at the time. Your auditor receives books that were reconciled as the year ran.
At thousands of returns, the costly errors are the ones no eye can catch. The same system that produces the filings is what catches them.
The plans enumerate themselves out of the filings, not a list someone maintains. Every return is generated on an accrual basis from the reconciled register and compared against the prior year before it is filed.
Three of the mistakes it is built to catch
A participating employer joins mid-year, or a related entity is added, and never becomes its own filing. One missing 5500 in a book of thousands is invisible to the eye, and a late or unfiled return runs to DOL penalties that compound by the day.
The catchThe enrollment feed is checked against the prior year’s Schedule D, so a plan that shows up in coverage but not in the filings is flagged before its deadline.
An employer or an employee terminates and the change is never processed, so the plan keeps paying for coverage that should have stopped and the continuation step that was owed is never triggered.
The catchTerminations are read off the feed as they arrive and reconciled against what is still being billed, so the gap surfaces in days.
Covered lives counted from a month-end snapshot miss every mid-month add and termination, which puts the PCORI fee and the premium-equivalent billing off by whatever churned that month.
The catchCounts come from the transactions themselves, and every return is checked against last year’s before filing, so a participant count that jumps or assets that appear are caught while they can still be verified.
Automation absorbs most of the manual work and we file directly with the agency, so what you pay for is the work that takes judgment.
Most of a plan manager’s headcount is not judgment. It is the work that keeping two systems in agreement creates: re-keying records between them, tracking down the data a filing is missing, and verifying terminations and reconciling premium to enrollment by hand. With one reconciled register behind everything, that work does not exist here. The rules engine sends the follow-ups and routes the verifications, so the people who remain are doing the part that was always expertise: the exceptions the machine flags, the delicate calls, an accountant reviewing books that are already reconciled. The same scope you have today, run on a fraction of the hands, with every specialist you use still in place.
Filing is one place the cost disappears outright. Mewa.io holds the DOL EFAST2 and IRS AIR credentials and transmits your returns directly, from our system to the agency, with no filing service in between and no per-form fee riding on every employer. You sign as plan administrator with your own EFAST2 credentials and we transmit as a registered transmitter. An acknowledgment is retained against every plan, and a rejection is visible the same day and corrected by the people who prepared the return.
Leave your email and you’ll hear from the person who would manage your account. If it is useful, we can start from your last filed 5500 and show you what our checks would have said about it.
Or email us directly.