Discover Benefits, Programs, Assignments, and Disbursements

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Review the purpose of benefit and program objects.
  
• Explain how benefit assignments and disbursement objects work.
  

Benefits and Programs

And now, the grand finale! So far, you’ve seen how Benefit Management provides a comprehensive view of the people and organizations you work with, and facilitates and streamlines the application process. In this unit, we cover the objects that you use to configure, assign, and disburse the benefits your agency administers.

Here’s a quick look at the Public Sector Solutions objects that represent the various forms of assistance your organization provides.

• A benefit is a specific form of financial or non-financial assistance that a government or other public organization provides to a constituent.
  
• A benefit type record categorizes a set of related benefits.
  
• A program stores a collection of benefits. When you enroll a constituent into a program, they receive all of the associated benefits.
  

In the Social Program Management Data Model in Public Sector Solutions Trailhead module, you learned that you can set up benefits and programs to provide social service aid such as counseling sessions, transportation, and meal delivery. In Benefit Management, you can use these same objects to control the financial aspects of assistance.

On the benefit record, you can define the associated program, enrollment count, benefit manager, minimum and maximum benefit amounts, and other data.

For example, here’s a benefit record for the LIHEAP benefit.

You configure the programs and benefits that your organization provides during initial setup, or when new forms of assistance become available. You can then modify prescreening assessment forms, applications, and review processes to align with the specific requirements of each program or benefit.

Benefit Assignment and Disbursement

After the constituent applies for a specific benefit and the caseworker approves financial assistance, all that’s left to do is assign and distribute the benefit. Normally, setting up payment schedules is a time-consuming process, but with Benefit Management, you can deliver benefits to constituents faster and more effectively than ever.

The Benefit Assignment object connects a benefit to an approved application and contains information about approved payments to the constituent. In the benefit assignment record, you can set the total benefit amount that the constituent is eligible to receive, and define the amount and frequency of each transaction. You can also quickly view the amount that’s already been allocated, the remaining amount to disburse, and preview upcoming disbursements. Manage the duration of a benefit assignment by setting start and end dates, and schedule the next payout date.

The Benefit Assignment Adjustment object gives you the ability to make changes to the benefit assignment. It represents a monetary or nonmonetary benefit adjustment made to an enrollee, which can be disbursed in various frequencies.

The Benefit Disbursement object contains information about an individual payment to the constituent. So, after you assign the benefit to the constituent, you need to set up each disbursement as the payment dates arrive—or do you?

In Benefit Management, you can set up and customize a flow to automatically create disbursements based on the payment and schedule information you enter in the benefit assignment record. For example, if you set a monthly payment of $1200 to disburse over the course of a year, the flow automatically creates a $100 disbursement record each month for the duration of the schedule. The constituent can view the disbursement schedule and amounts from their self-service portal. To learn more about benefit and disbursement capabilities, see the Assign and Disburse Benefits to Eligible Applicants article in Salesforce Help.

Of course, just like with benefit assignments, you sometimes need to make changes to individual disbursements. Create a benefit disbursement adjustment when you need to modify or correct the amount of a disbursement based on new information from the constituent.

This table offers additional details about programs, benefits, assignments, and disbursement objects, and provides a few examples.

Here’s a look at the data model objects related to benefits and programs.

You’ve seen how benefit, program, assignment, and disbursement objects function in Benefit Management. Before moving on, take a final look at the full Benefit Management Data Model in all its glory!

In this module, you’ve explored how each of these components works together to provide an intuitive and transparent benefit application experience for constituents in Cosville. Caseworkers like Connor can quickly and accurately evaluate each constituent’s unique circumstances, and roll out important resources and services smoothly and efficiently. With Benefit Management, you have all the tools you need to significantly improve the well-being of your community members, and propel your agency to greater heights.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Assign and Disburse Benefits to Eligible Applicants
• Salesforce Help: Process Benefit Assignment Adjustments by Using a Guided Flow