Can an HSA Advance account be established or adjusted mid-year?

Yes. You can set up an HSA Advance account for a new employee at any time during the benefit Plan Year. The advance amount provided should not be higher than the total of employee contributions that will occur in the remainder of the Plan Year.

Similarly, current employees may decide to adjust their payroll election during the year. If an employee reduces or increases their HSA contribution, it is possible to change the HSA Advance amount for your employee as well through your Employer Account or via a CDEx import record. If the employee has used HSA Advance funds, they will not be able to reduce their HSA contributions to less than their advance repayment amount. (Within the Member Account, there is an optional configuration to reduce the updated advance amount by the outstanding repayment amount to reduce risk having an outstanding balance to repay at the end of the year.)

How is the HSA Advance money paid back?

Surency will automatically facilitate an electronic fund transfer to deposit into your bank account when a consumer’s payroll deduction or employer contribution is received.

How do employees access the HSA Advance funds?

The process happens automatically. When an employee makes a payment using their Benefits Card or makes a personal payment and requests a distribution using the Surency mobile app or Member Account, and they have insufficient funds in their HSA and their investment account, funds from the HSA Advance account will then be applied.

Who determines the employee’s HSA Advance amount?

You set the HSA Advance amount per employee. Best practice is to set the amount to either the payroll election for the benefit year or a percentage of the consumer’s payroll election to minimize the risk of employees having an outstanding advance repayment amount at the end of the Plan Year. If you make an HSA Advance amount available in the middle of a Plan Year, it is recommended that the advance amount be equal to or less than the amount of remaining payroll deductions. There will be configuration settings to determine if the advance balance should be included in the auto-pay settings for claims exchange.

Does the HSA Advance fund have to be equal for all employees?

If you offer HSA Advance, you must provide it to all eligible employees, but the amount you advance to each employee should not be higher than their annual contribution, so the amount will vary by employee. Employees who do not have an HSA-eligible plan cannot participate.

How do I fund the HSA Advance account?

You will receive a notification indicating when and how much HSA Advance funding will be pulled from the bank account you designated. The system will automatically debit this account based on the amounts in the notification.

Who is responsible for funding the employee’s HSA Advance account?

As the employer offering this feature, you are responsible for funding the HSA Advance account for all eligible employees.

How does HSA Advance work?

From an employer perspective, HSA Advance works like this:

1. You select the bank account that will fund the HSA Advance account and to which repayments will be made.
2. Using the Employer Account or a CDEx file, designate the amount that will be available for each employee.
3. When an employee uses their Benefits Card or pays an expense, the system determines whether HSA Advance funding is needed and automatically generates a funding transaction to pull funds from the designated bank account to contribute to the consumer’s HSA to be used to settle the distribution request. 
   NOTE: The system will automatically deplete the consumer’s HSA balance (cash and investments) before drawing from the HSA Advance account.
4. As payroll deductions and employer contributions are applied to the employee’s HSA throughout the Plan Year, they will automatically be used to repay the HSA Advance fund account.

This is how HSA Advance works for employees:

They pay for an eligible expense, where the cost is more than what has already been contributed to their HSA.

1. Money from their HSA that has already been contributed will be used first to pay for the expense.
2. If they have money in their HSA investment account, that money will automatically be used next.
3. Then, money from HSA Advance will be used to pay for the remainder of the expense – as long as they have elected to contribute that much or more for that Plan Year, or the employer’s policy allows HSA Advance to cover that much.
4. They will then have an HSA Advance balance, which will automatically be repaid through payroll deductions and employer contributions until the HSA Advance balance is paid in full.

What is HSA Advance?

While HSA use continues to grow, it can be intimidating to decide to switch to an HSA-eligible high deductible health plan (HDHP). Surency’s HSA Advance feature provides you with another way to incentivize employees to participate.

HSA Advance enables you to provide HSA funds to your employees to pay for eligible expenses before they have contributed the funds themselves. A typical scenario is at the beginning of a Plan Year when an employee first enrolls in an HSA or an existing enrollee has a zero balance, and incurs an unplanned medical expense. You set the amount per employee.