The next section of onboarding is the "Payment Set Up" step. There is one step within this section.
1. Contribution Funding
Each pay period, you will instruct MERIT of the retirement account contributions that you deferred from employees' paychecks. As part of that process, the funds must be remitted to MERIT to deposit in participating employees' retirement accounts.
In this section, please provide instructions on how you would like to remit those payments for each of the pay schedules created in the last step.
There are three remittance options available:
- Bank Account via ACH - Recommended option - This option allows MERIT to pull the total contribution amount directly from your bank account. The ACH will process automatically each time you provide payroll contribution information into the portal. In this option, you don't need to take any action to remit the funds once you have submitted the contribution information to MERIT. This is the quickest and simplest way to have the deferred funds contributed to employees' retirement accounts.
- Paper Check - In this option, you are responsible for sending in a check each time you process a contribution submission to MERIT for your employees. This requires you to manage the remittance process each pay period in addition to entering the contribution information into the portal.
- ACH Push (very uncommon) - In this option, rather than MERIT automatically pulling the contribution amount directly from your bank account once you submit your employees' contributions, you will need to go into your banking system and send the payment to MERIT. This requires you to manage the remittance process each pay period in addition to entering the contribution information into the portal.
Click the link to the payment option you choose for further instructions.
Note: If you will be remitting payments from different bank accounts for various groups of employees, there will need to be a pay schedule set up for each unique bank account, even if the actual pay frequency and schedule are the same. In this case, return to the Payroll Set Up page by selecting the Previous button to set up another payroll frequency if you have not already.