The start forms provided by your payroll company likely include an area to select an employee's ACA Status, or "Affordable Care Act Employment Basis." This selection is pertinent to the administration and data tracking of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Employee Classifications:

• Full Time: Employee is reasonably expected to be employed an average of at least 30 hours of service per week or 130 hours per month at the start of employment.
  • NOTE: Full time is also the proper selection if an employee is only working a single week, and is expected to work 30+ hours within that week.
    • For more information about how to identify full-time employees, click here to visit IRS.gov.
• Part Time: Employee is reasonably expected to be employed, on average, fewer than 30 hours of service per week or fewer than 130 hours per month at the start of employment.
• Variable Hour:* The employer cannot determine the employee's weekly or monthly hours at start of employment because the employee’s hours are variable or otherwise uncertain.
• Seasonal:* Employee is in a position for which the “customary annual employment” is six months or less (i.e. retail, agriculture, hospitality).

*NOTE: Some payroll services include only “Full Time” and “Part Time” options on their start forms. See FYI's below for more information.

FYI’s:

• Most production companies will have either full-time employees or part-time employees. 
• Many payroll services include only “Full Time” and “Part Time” options on their start forms.
• Depending on the payroll service, sometimes employees marked as “Variable Hour” are treated as full-time employees.
• Generally, it is not recommended to select "Seasonal" for production crew classification, unless you’ve specifically had a conversation with your payroll service and confirm that “Seasonal” is appropriate.
• It is common practice when administering benefits via your payroll service, for payroll to proactively confirm with the production that an employee qualifies as full-time before officially enrolling them in benefits. Meaning that classifying an employee as "Full Time" at the onset is not the only factor in them qualifying for benefits.
• Some payroll services require an ACA status to be indicated on the start form before they can process the contract, while others assume the employee is a certain status (usually full-time) if none is indicated.
• The ACA status selection will not affect an employee’s time card.
• "Full Time" is the default blanket selection on TiM Templates, because it is the ‘safest’ option for employers; in case an ACA selection is left blank, “Full Time” will ensure that the employee will still be tracked and considered for benefits under the ACA. 
  • Any Admin or anyone with "Edit Startwork Templates" Permission has the ability to to change this selection in the Builder in TiM (just move the "X" Markup to your preferred selection - see instructions below).  

How to change the ACA selection on your Startwork Templates:

If you want to edit your Startwork Templates to reflect a different ACA status, and depending on how widely you want that change to go into effect, be sure you do so within your Company Library and the Startwork Templates for each Project (see instructions below).

 If you choose to remove the “X” entirely, Gatekeepers (and any other Approver) can use the “Add Text” tool at the Review step to mark the applicable checkbox for each employee before sending the Startwork to the payroll service -- just be sure to communicate this extra step to your team, so Startwork isn't submitted sans ACA selection.

NOTE: Any changes made will be reflected on Startwork submitted going forward (changes to Startwork Templates are not applied retroactively).

1. Go to Company Library / Startwork Templates.
2. Select "Standard Packets."
3. Select "Edit" or "Create New Version." This will open the Builder.
4. Select the thumbnail for your start form.
5. Under "Affordable Care Act Employment Basis," click and drag the "X" markup and yellow check box to switch the selection to your preferred status.
   • Alternatively, though not recommended, you can make the selection required for employees to choose by deleting the "X" markup plus the three yellow boxes, and replacing them with four "Multi-checkboxes" (ie: "Multi-checkboxes, 1 required of [4]"). We don't recommend this because most employees aren't familiar enough with the criteria of each ACA classification to accurately self classify.
6. Click "Save and Exit."
7. Click the orange "Publish" button (within Company Library, to make the revised packet available for use at the Project level) / the orange "Distribute" button (within Startwork Templates, to make the revised packet available to be auto-matched to employees going forward)
8. Repeat for all packet types (including your Standard Job Change Packet!).