SimplyInsured is saying that automatic deductions will not be discontinued and that I do not need to switch to Allstate. Who is lying?

I'm here to provide more details and clarification about this, Marchand.

Starting August 31, 2024, QuickBooks will no longer support SimplyInsured, and automated deductions for plans associated with this health broker will be discontinued. Thus, Allstate Health Solutions will be QuickBooks' new health insurance broker.

Additionally, it's important to note that no changes will be made to customers's existing policy. If you have any questions about your existing health plan, please contact SimplyInsured or the carrier.

Furthermore, after August 31, 2024, any changes to policies and employees made through SimplyInsured will not automatically reflect in Quickbooks. If you need to adjust SimplyInsured payroll deductions after this date, you'll need to manually update the deductions on your employees' profiles.

To ensure that automated deduction updates continue, you have the option to switch your broker to Allstate Health Solutions by initiating a broker of record change.

By changing your broker:

• The cost and coverage of your plan will not change.
• You can continue to pay the same premiums and receive the same benefits as carriers currently support them.
• There will be no gaps in your plan coverage, and you can initiate the process at any time of the year.

For more information about the insurance benefits provided by Allstate Health Solutions and how to sign up through QuickBooks Online Payroll, please follow the link below:  Sign up for health insurance through QuickBooks and Allstate Health Solutions.

Moreover, you can visit this article to manage your worker's compensation in QuickBooks: Understand workers’ compensation insurance.

I'm just one post away if you have follow-up questions about the health insurance through QuickBooks. You can click the reply button below to enter your queries. You have a good one.

Unfortunately, you did NOT provide any more details than what the emails from QuickBooks have stated, nor did you answer my question. Additionally, your statement actually contradicts one of the emails I received from QB back in June.

There is a reason SimplyInsured is saying QB’s claim is false. I am waiting to hear from them as well. But if you have no other information to give, that’s fine.

I got a clearer answer from SimplyInsured. They are using a third party to handle deductions through QB. At least someone was able to provide more than the same information on the emails and web site.

Let me assist by putting this into Intuit-language. I have dealt with Intuit for over 25 years and speak fluent Intuit. They are a wiley bunch, but after many iterations and evolutions, I have gleaned much about their motivations and communication. What follows is an interpretation of previous Intuit emails regarding this matter:

Hello! We truly care about you, "insert name here". Because of that, we intend to cease working with the vendor that you have been integrated with for quite some time because they will not "play ball" financially, if you know what we mean. We have a major obligation to our stockholders, whoops, we mean, customers, and because of the decrease in our record profit from the past few years, we have no other choice but to inconvenience you, for your own good, and put in place a vendor that is even more inept, to satisfy our bottom line, whoops, we mean to help extract more money from you, for us! Whoops! D*mn autocorrect!!!! What we meant to say is that we have our customers' true interests at heart! We know that when there comes a time that another product that is actually helpful, that also utilizes cutting-edge technology that has existed for several years but would cost money to implement, thus affecting our shareholders' bottom line, that you, our customer that is already so invested and doesn't have the time to break away from our ecosystem, will comply, we mean, understand, that our intentions are all for the good of all.

Based on the other messages here, everyone has experienced the same level of ambiguity and lack of clarity on what was happening. We have been pleased with our interaction with Simply Insured and are frustrated with how all of this has been communicated and handled. We processed the broker of record change to All-State out of an abundance of caution to ensure that our team would not be negatively impacted and largely because of the specific language QB chose to utilize when informing their customers of what was happening. After digging in deeper, this would appear to be nothing more that what one of the other posters has already identified. QB found a partner that would enable them to make more money.

That is fine, and they are in the business to make money. That said, the manner in which they presented what was happening left the reader with only one option: to switch or have to do everything manually. After multiple calls with QB, All-State, and SI. That is just not true. SI has partnered with Finch to integrate with QB moving forward. For those wishing to stay with SI, I imagine that adds a bit more risk in the chain of information but probably not much. I am still determining if we are going to cancel the broker of record change before it takes place at the end of August.

QB you should be completely transparent with your customers and let them make the decision that is in their best interest. At best this communication was handled poorly, at worst it was intentional for the purposes of forcing your customer base to a more profitable vendor.

This was the email I got from SimplyInsured:

Hi,

Your integration with QuickBooks will remain the same. There will be no changes to your current level of integration. All automatic deductions, enrollments, and terms will continue as usual. The notices and messaging from the QuickBooks marketing team are incorrect. 

Our team has secured a third party to assist in ensuring that your group's automatic deductions will continue with no interruptions. Our product team will be sending out a more detailed email soon.

We have ceased doing business with QuickBooks effective 08/31/2024, so they are unaware of the how we have chosen to move forward with our QuickBooks groups.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out.

Thank you for being a valued SimplyInsured customer.

This is ONE BIG MESS! 

I like others chose to transition over to Allstate Health to be able to keep health premium deductions automated - and yes that seemed to be the only option unless you are prepared to do manual deductions.

So, when I signed up several weeks ago I was informed that someone would call me shortly. No one ever called me so today I called Allstate and talked to this very nice person who clearly had no idea what the next steps are. She told me that they are "working on it" and that she couldn't guarantee that someone would be able to tell me about next steps by end of month.

Quickbooks: what the heck is going on here?

Hi there, GLADK. I'm here to provide additional information about your existing application in Allstate Health Solutions.

Please be aware that QuickBooks will no longer support SimplyInsured after August 31, 2024. Allstate Health Solutions will be the new health insurance provider for QuickBooks.

Since you've mentioned that you already signed up for an application to Allstate Health Solutions, kindly check your spam or junk folders for updates. They will send you an email with the quote ID associated with your application submission.

Furthermore, you can contact their support team from time to time for updates about your application.

You can visit our article for more information about your worker's compensation in QBO: Understand workers’ compensation insurance.

Comment on the post if you still have concerns about the insurance provider in QBO. I'm always here to help.

Agree. When I spoke to All-State on the phone two days ago our "application" was still in process. We finalized everything in early July and hadn't heard anything from All-State or QBO until I reached out two days ago. When I did, the woman on the phone (who was very nice and clearly wanted to help) had zero information about what the next steps are and said that an email would be sent telling us what those steps were. She even unintentionally referenced that we would have to "get information from our existing broker and get it into their systems". I asked her what I would need to do in order to cancel my broker of record change request and she said, "just call us back and tell us you do not want to move."

Experience would tell me that this is not going to be as seamless as QB has led us to believe. I have already initiated the connection with SI's chosen 3rd party (www.tryfinch.com). SI sent an email saying to keep everything automated in QB all that was needed was to connect the new dots. It was easy and painless. I am going to do some testing to ensure that there aren't any gotchas between now and when we make our final decision on transitioning. That decision is going to be made by August 15th.

QB, I appreciate your willingness to respond to these conversations, but responding with a canned answer that is basically what you have already sent out is not helping in any way. The previous canned responses got us all of the ambiguity in the first place. Respectfully, would you provide more detail on exactly what is going to happen between now, August 31st and beyond?

Transitioning to another health insurance broker can be challenging, @jbaxiss. I'm here to elaborate on what will happen during these changes onwards.

It's correct that QuickBooks will no longer have an integration with SimplyInsured. Following is the discontinuation of automated deductions for plans with them. These changes were taken to enhance our services and deliver the best value to our customers. 

The effectiveness of these changes will placed on August 31, 2024. Presently, there will be no changes to health deductions, but, starting the specified date of the discontinuation, you'll need to manually enter or update this for your employees if you meet certain conditions. 

Conditions are as follows for manually entering or updating health deductions:

• You have a new employee that starts at your business and enrolls in health coverage
• There is a change in policy that affects an employee due to a qualified life event, such as a change in their marital status or number of dependents
• You renew or purchase a new SimplyInsured health policy, or purchase a new policy with another broker that isn’t Allstate Health Solutions
• You switch your current broker to a new broker that isn’t Allstate Health Solutions

Moreover, switching to our new health insurance partner, Allstate Health Solutions, allows your clients to maintain automated deductions by performing a broker of record switch. 

Stay in touch if you have further clarifications about the changes in health insurance providers in QuickBooks, @jbaxiss. The Community is always available to share information and solutions. Take care!

Thank you for your reply. Allow me to say that Intuit is quite possibly the most inept company that we deal with. The lack of useful information to your customers - the companies and people that keep your incompetence afloat - is frustrating, to say the least. This lack of providing timely information and truthful, honest explanations amplifies the distrust that already exists between customers and Intuit. Let's face it - Intuit is far from an exemplary company. While Intuit doesn't care about their customers beyond what they can extract f`rom them financially, they should understand that while this may not be a "big deal" to Intuit (beyond who's pockets are lined) - it IS TO US. We have a responsibility to our employees. Something that I suspect Intuit does not understand at all. The bottom line is this - get your crap together and be honest. I, like many others I have spoken with, will leave Intuit for a better option without the blink of an eye because of their lack of customer care. Something better is always around the corner. Intuit has gotten so big that they believe they don't have to take care of their customers.

This response from Intuit is only partly true.  The part about SimplyInsured being discontinued in Sept is true.  However, if you fill out the broker changeover to Allstate Health NOW - they are not ready to receive you.  My client filled out the broker changeover information provided through QB to changeover in July - before the auto-deduct feature ran out.  Immediately SimplyInsured discontinued auto-deductions and the service portal became unavailable (understandable since we changed brokers).  The carrier was fine and now lists Allstate Health as the broker of record.  But my client received NOTHING from Allstate Health, no contact, no self-service portal, no phone call, no training, nothing.  They had to deduct manually for weeks on end, waiting for contact from the new broker service or for the QB benefits portal/integration to be installed.  Finally I had to call Allstate and let them know who my client was.  They didn't have a clue what to do of course and just said "I think this has to do with QuickBooks and I guess you just need to wait".  My client still has no employee self-service portal over a month later.  Allstate Health does have an employee navigator tool outside of QB, but they still have not connected it to any QB/Intuit integration.  For that matter, Allstate Health has not even connected it to integrate with the carrier.  It's just sitting there empty.  We have been enrolling my client's new hires directly with the carrier ourselves which is not very fun for the new hire.  About 5 weeks in at this point.  Not a very well-planned changeover and at this point the "integrated provider" status for QB is non-existent.

I would Iike to be able to say that I am

surprised, but, sadly, I am not. Intuit is known for not having their act together. Since they are laying off 1,800 people, I am sure things will get better. They intend to the more AI-focused (ie: cheaper with an acceptable margin of error for their profit margin). I am sure their implementation of AI will be as stellar as every other feature they have rolled out. Just look how seamless this transfer has been.

Why are you sending me a link to an article on workers comp?? This is not helpful at all

What is the deal with these stupid canned responses QuickBooks?? People who use your product are not stupid and we all need real and honest answers! 

I signed up for Allstate 6 weeks ago now and have heard NOTHING! Just like others on this thread I called Allstate and talked to this very nice lady who had absolutely no idea what was going on and was unable to tell me what the next steps are. She told me her manager would call me, but I never heard back. I am actually at the point where I don't want to sign up with Allstate either.

Anyone have recommendations for other providers?  

I can see the importance of ensuring you’re covered and informed, @GLADK. Allow me to route you to the appropriate support team that can help you further with this.

I acknowledge that you've already contacted the Allstate Support team. However, I still recommend contacting them one more time since they are the only ones who can check the status of your application and handle this in a secure environment: How do I view the next steps after my application is submitted

Let me also add this blog to get answers to the common questions about health insurance in QuickBooks: Find affordable and flexible healthcare packages from your QuickBooks Payroll account through Allsta...

If you have further questions about the changes in health insurance providers in QuickBooks, please don't hesitate to reach out to us here in the Community.

With all due respect, "reaching out" to Allstate Health Solutions is all my client has been doing for the last 5 weeks.  And they have none of the "necessary tools and expertise" so far to do anything.  They don't have a clue what to do for QuickBooks users.

I recommend YOU reach out to the Allstate Support team directly.  You should GIVE THEM or DEMAND FROM THEM the necessary tools and expertise to deal with your customers if they want to be part of YOUR ecosystem.

Sorry, but this is just another utterly useless reply. If you had read my post you'd see that I write: "Just like others on this thread I called Allstate and talked to this very nice lady who had absolutely no idea what was going on and was unable to tell me what the next steps are"

So, I have already reached out - just like a lot of other customers have. Can you please escalate this and have someone give us an appropriate answer?

Has anyone successfully managed to add Finch as external accountant to their intuit payroll account  ? I have tried multiple times now, and I either get a 'unable to add an external accountant' error or a 'internal server error'.

I have two different intuit products under my intuit login, but it seems to account for that and allows me to select the payroll product. Is there any way to add Finch from the quickbooks side of the account to get this going ? The script that simplyinsured wants to run seems to not work.

Let me provide some details as to why this is happening, really_exasperated.

In the normal process, you'll only get these errors when your payroll account is inactive. You'll have to make sure that the account you're working on is active. However, if it is active but you're still experiencing the same, I suggest contacting our payroll support team so they double-check on this and investigate further. They have the tools to pull up your account in a secure environment. 

1. Sign in to your QBO company.
2. Go to the Help (?) menu.
3. Select the Search tab.
4. Click the Contact Us button.
5. Select the Payroll topic in the What can we help you with? page.
6. Choose a way to connect (Have us call you or Chat with us).

Furthermore, you can learn how to take a closer look at your business finances and employees. QuickBooks provides several payroll reports that you can use to view useful information. I've added this article for more information: Run Payroll Reports.

Keep me posted if you have any other concerns when adding Finch as an external accountant. We'll always be right here to help.

I have also initiated the transfer of the broker on record from Simply Insured to Allstate because I also wanted to make sure the auto deductions would continue. I have called Allstate multiple times to see where we are at in this process since they are not reaching out to me. I did receive a cc'd email from our insurance company to Allstate confirming the transfer. After that, I received the DocuSign email from Allstate to agree to the switch, which I signed and sent back. Yesterday, I called Allstate again asking where we were at in the process and she basically told me they are way behind and my info is probably just sitting in someone's email waiting to be processed. They obviously were not equipped to handle this many customers switching over all at once. With that being said, I still have the Simply Insured dashboard on my benefits page on QB so I saved all of the benefit information about deductions, etc. so that I will have it handy after 8/31 when I will have to start entering these deductions myself until Allstate gets their act together. Today, I received an email from Allstate explaining the next step in the process which is for me to fill out their Excel spreadsheet with all of the names, birthdate, addresses, ss# of all of my employees and their dependents and then email this back to Allstate. I do not think this is a secure way to transfer the information from one broker to the next. There has to be a better way to get the information to them. I am going to call back again today to ask this question. I feel that things are only moving forward after each phone call that I make to Allstate so I will continue to call and initiate the next step in the process until it is complete. I also spoke with QB yesterday and they also clearly have no idea how the transfer process should take place and are not helpful at all. The notice on the benefits page about making the switch to Allstate has now disappeared off of my benefits page on QB and it now looks back to normal like it did before any of these changes were necessary. I only see the Allstate App under the Apps tab in QB online. QB said once the registration with Allstate is complete, only then will I have access to an Allstate dashboard on my benefits page. Until this process is completed I will have to have new hires sign up for benefits directly from the carrier. In hindsight, if I had known that Simply Insured would use a third party to make the deductions, then I would have just stayed with them but they also did not clearly explain the process and we are now too far in the process to change our minds. 

FWIW I am providing an update to my earlier post.

Given the continued ambiguity and the lack of consistent information from both QB and All-State, we decided not to move forward with the broker of record change. I processed the tryfinch integration and had SI confirm that everything was in working order. It took approximately 5 minutes including the phone call to SI.

Once that was completed, I called All-State and asked them to cancel the request to switch brokers (I had not yet signed the docusign that they sent). They processed the cancel after asking a few questions and told me that an All-State agent might call to discuss our decision. It has been a week or so and I have not yet received a call which is understandable given the volume that they are likely trying to manage.

At the end of the day, we made the decision to stay with SI because we had been pleased with their service and responsiveness. Additionally, we were able to verify that SI selected a third party (tryfinch) that is ubiquitous in the fintech world for successfully and professionally managing third party integrations such as these. Finally, our experience was that SI was the only party involved in situation that was able to provide answers to our questions and a solution with clear steps on what would happen moving forward.

We fully expect there to be some hiccups on September 1st but are more comfortable at this time working with SI to resolve those unknowns than we are with either QBO or All-State.

yes. I have successfully added the integration and it appears to be working smoothly at this time. I suspect some hiccups on Sept 1, but have confirmed to the best of my ability that all is in working order so that risk can be mitigated. The tryfinch setup was painless. If you have not already, I suggest calling SI directly. I have found them to be fantastically helpful, unambiguous, and armed with the information to resolve any issue that I presented to them. My guess is that they can get you in touch with the appropriate team at tryfinch to solve your problem.

Update to my prior post (issues with adding Finch):

I had put in a support ticket with simplyinsured informing them that I couldn't get the connection to work through the process outlined in their emails along with a screen-shot of the error code and details on the fact that I have multiple products under one QB login.

Yesterday I received an email from the support tech that they had issues with the integration and that those are now fixed. They asked me to re-run the integration.

I was just about to sit down to do this this morning when I got a call from simplyinsured. I went through the process to 'refresh the connection' and it went through to a 'success page'.

I also received an email from QB stating:

The way the integration works is that once you are logged into QB inside of the Finch window, they run a script of sorts that adds a user called 'SimplyInsured' to your payroll account. That user has limited admin privileges to make the entries for the payroll deductions (no different from giving 'Susie' at your bookkeepers office a login to do the same).

According to the support tech, there is a potential hangup if you already have multiple QB users with access to your QB products. The different tiers of QB products allow different numbers of admin users.

So based on my experience, I suggest that anyone who has an issue getting the Simplyinsured --> Finch --> QB integration to work work with Simplyinsured's support to get this accomplished. They have been helpful and ultimately successful on my behalf.