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What would be the best way to manage Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)? An FSA allows an employee to set aside a portion of his or her earnings to pay for qualified expenses as established in the cafeteria plan, most commonly for medical expenses but often for dependent care or other expenses. Money deducted from an employee's pay into an FSA is not subject to payroll taxes, resulting in a substantial payroll tax savings.

Besides entering an Expense in the Expense Register (or during a Visit), I wanted to keep up with which expenses I've sumbitted for reimbursement, and which ones were paid etc. This helps me determine what I should allocate for next year (don't want to put too much since if you don't use it you lose it).

I suppose I could link a Journal, but wanted to see what other ideas you had. I could not find any questions on the forum for Flexible Spending Account or FSA. Thanks!

Drix,

Flexible Savings Accounts (FSA), Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) are all part of the family of Consumer Directed Health Care (CDHC) offerings.  HealthFrame's version 2.x release introduces initial expense management features that can be used to support these products.  We expect to improve our support in future releases and we certainly appreciate feedback from users who are using HealthFrame in conjunction with with CDHC plans.  Please keep your comments coming! 

Some of the areas we know could use improvement include:

• Tracking FSA administrators (banks, etc) as an additional organizational entity
• Special reports for tracking 'deposits' (paycheck deductions) and 'withdrawals' (reimbursements)
• Ability to import electronic bank statements for reconciliation

Your idea to use journals to track expenses that are submitted and reimbursed is a reasonable approach.  Another way you could have considered is to use 'Communications' with the FSA administrator.  A key disadvantage to these two approaches is the reporting limits with both.  No reports on journals or communications would generate expense value roll-ups (adding up values, etc).  To get the best expense-based reporting you should create expenses in the register and then use the reporting capabilities that are built-in.  Remember, of course, to create named customizations so that you can go back to these reports any time you want!

The basic steps are shown in the image below (using Susan Marie Taylor's sample PHR):

• Create a new expense entry for 'Submitted'.  Assign the 'payee' to your FSA administrator.  Link to the list of expenses you are submitting a reimbursement request for.
• As submitted expenses are reimbursed, change the type to 'Reimbursed'.
• Create a custom expense registry report that displays 'Submitted' and 'Reimbursed' expenses.  Don't forget to manage your date ranges so that you get yearly results.
  

Thanks for these great questions! 
Support Team

Thanks! I will have to try that out when my brain is not fried! :)

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