Can anybody point me to a stand-alone, reasonably priced (or free) retirement benefit calculation program, which would determine the accrued benefit and also do lump sum calculations as well as monthly options?.

We're looking to standardize this process internally to lower the level at which this work can be done, by developing something, but first I thought I'd ask if such an animal already exists. Basically I'm looking for a user-friendly program that a clerk can run with some modest training, that could be adaptable to numerous plan designs. Maybe this is wishful thinking?

Perhaps it is just my bias, but I am partial to the phrase "Hire An Actuary".

That would be lowering the level at which the work is done?

I would suggest that you increase the amount of your ERISA fiduciary coverage if you want to follow this course. Your request is similar to to the do it yourself approach to drafting a will. People think they can buy generic software that will give them a valid will and avoid estate taxes without having to hire an attorney. The problem is none of these programs guarantees that the document produced is valid under the applicable laws in the state where the individual lives. While I am not an actuary, I have been involved in several disputes involving the valuation of benfits under DB plans and I am amazed at all the variation / discretion in how benefits are determined. In every case no two actuaries came up with the same value of a DB benefit for the same employee--It makes GAAP look simple.

With responses like this I retract my question. I completely disagree. Do we still do actuarial valuations by hand? Do lawyers hand write wills, and never use templates, secretaries, and boilerplates? Better get a good eraser.

And I never said anything about not having the appropriate person review, direct and supervise. Gee how we jump to conclusions. Efficiency and quality control are not mutually exclusive.

Rough board today?

We have had good luck writing programs in Excel/Lotus to handle ben. calcs. Once you create the basics - the adaptations due to early retirement factors, averaging periods, etc. are fairly easy. Once the particular plan's ben calc worksheet is set up, we can usually do the calcs very effeciently.

I have never seen a "canned" program that works well enough to use.

Perhaps my original suggestion could be modified as follows:

Hire a competent pension actuary to design your procedures. A existing product/service may already exist!

We have competent pension actuaries who have designed our procedures. It's not the procedures that are the problem. It's the time involved to implement the procedures from start to finish compared to the amount billed. Does anybody make money doing benefit calcs at $100 or $150 each?

And, Keith, thanks, that is the kind of feedback I was hoping for. We also have programs per client; we were looking for something more uniform.

For example, I've seen a program that a very large company uses internally that appears to be comprehensive, but in that case too comprehensive.

We have various programs that will do the calcs and the forms, but they are decentralized and case specific. We're thinking of broadening such a program (to add variables at each step), but first it seemed logical to see who may have already invented that wheel.

We're more in the $150 - $200/ calc and "no" we generally aren't making any money unless we can do them in bulk.

We have greatly streamlined our process by sending each of our clients the 15 or so pages that goes with every calc (one set for >$5000 and one set for < $5,000) and then we just send 1 page of benefit information and a copy of the calculation worksheet whenever someone terminates. This saves a lot of administrative "busy work". But we still usually can't get them in and out in < 1 hr.

LVAdmin sold by Lynchval does an awesome job. It is menu driven and can handle plans from vanailla to ones with several old grandfathered benefits. We just recently started using it to automate our benefit calculations (we are a small firm and needed a way to standardize things) and things are going well. You can find out more from a guy named Mike Berman at Lynchval 703-709-1000.

Thanks, Ray, I'll look into that.

Keith, terrific idea. Thanks for passing it along.


p.s. from Lynchval's web site:

"LVadminUser is designed so it can be run by employees with no knowledge of the intricacies of the pension plan"

WinTech (Proval) also has a program. Look for the ProAdmin section at www.winklevoss.com/wintech/index.asp It may be useful depending on your volume.