Know what you’re paying for.
Know what your crew is getting.

You can ask to see more. But wading through an overwhelming number of plans is how these decisions stall for five years. Three options, weighed against what the company can afford and what you want employees to receive — and the reasoning is the deliverable.

Both are in scope: group medical consulting, supplemental health, medical expense reimbursement plans and wellness-integrated programmes. None is right by default, so they get evaluated together rather than claimed on a website. Your CPA belongs in that conversation.

Yes. Those employees can still receive something through their own employer rather than nothing, and documenting a spouse waiver makes the enrolment picture reflect what is actually happening. What a carrier makes of that depends on the carrier and your group.

It may be worse on paper than it is in life. Getting eligibility and waivers right starts with finding out who is actually covered elsewhere and documenting it. What that means for your group is what the review is for.

Worth asking rather than assuming. The review establishes what is genuinely available to a group your size, starting with an accurate eligibility and waiver picture, because a headline enrolment number often understates what is going on.

Start with what is already in place: what is worth preserving, what needs improving, and getting you ready for the first renewal under your ownership.

Worth checking, and that is a standing part of the job. What suits nine people in one location rarely suits thirty across two, so the strategy gets reassessed as headcount and needs change.

Renewal is the point of having an adviser rather than a signup: what you can plan for, which decisions are genuinely in your control, and how the strategy should respond.

Whoever handles HR gets the options explained so they can help select plans that suit your people, and the programme is explained to employees directly. The test is whether they can explain it afterwards with nobody else in the room.

Sometimes they could, and you will be told when that is the honest answer. For some products the access, pricing or underwriting through a group differs from what an individual faces — but only where that is true of the specific policy, so you get shown where the advantage sits and where there is not one.

You set the eligibility rules, within what each carrier and benefit allows. Full-time only, after 60 days, whatever fits how you staff — written down so it stays consistent.

Ask your CPA. Tax treatment depends on how the arrangement is structured and on your business, and this page is not going to decide it. Nobody here is your accountant.

That is a reason to look at it rather than skip it. The roster moves person by person, not as one all-or-nothing decision, and waiver documentation matters more when people come and go, not less.

Then that is the answer you get, including when an option is plainly unfavourable. Not this year, and here is what to sort out first, beats being sold something that does not fit.

Nothing. Thirty minutes, and you leave with a clearer view of what your business could carry and what that would put in front of your team.