Travis Software Official Blog

All of us at Travis Software would like to wish you a safe and happy Fourth of July weekend.

WebCOBRA.com is loaded with small features that can make a BIG difference in your everyday COBRA Administration life, and two of those features are the Calendar and the To Do List.

Below is the raw holding data statistics from our support line. Since our average hold time hit our pre-ARRA numbers, we wanted to share them with you. Details below include our averages for time periods in the day and total experience breakdown. We track our experience in detailed segments, such as Hold Time between 11:30 and 12:30 on Wednesday, so you can see that as well.

The average hold time for the week of June 22 2009 through June 26, 2009 was 2:55 ... less than three minutes!

As we are sure you are aware, two COBRA State Continuation Laws have recently been signed into law for Pennsylvania and Utah, and we wanted to let you know that we have analyzed the laws and are currently working on adding capabilities to both the TravisCobra and WebCOBRA.com systems in order to help you administer your under-20 groups in those states.

It’s been almost a year since we started this Blog, and in that year, we’ve blogged about everything from product features and government policies to natural disasters. Now, we think it’s time to hear from you!

Our phone systems are not cooperating this morning, preventing us from either dialing out or letting customers call in. Our IT staff is on the phone (using his cellphone of course) to our vendor and trying to work out the technical glitch.

We’ll post updates here as we have them.

In the mean time, you can log cases and communicate with Travis Support through the self-service portal login.

Update 12:30 PM CST – Our vendor isolated the problem and we’ve resolved it. Our support call center is back online, and we’ll continue to respond to cases posted in the Self Service Portal.

As some of you may already know, we offer an IT Resources section for all of our Supervisor-level users within the WebCOBRA.com system, but what you may not know is that the IT Resources section is not just for IT people!

The short video below will give you a general overview of everything you can find in WebCOBRA IT Resources.

Today marks the 100th day since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was signed, enacting what proved to be the largest change to COBRA regulations in recent history. Below, tell us your ARRA story and answer a quick poll about COBRA participation.

One question that we have heard is, ‘Are you going to continue to support TravisCobra?’ The answer is resoundingly YES!

TravisCobra, and its DOS predecessor, has been running smoothly for 23 years and has a devoted user base. We believe in client hosted COBRA software, and we’ll be supporting it for years and years to come.

Two new ARRA reporting capabilities have been added to the TravisCobra system within the past week, and we wanted to make sure that you know about them!

Having two ARRA reports that deal with payments may seem like overkill; however, the two reports are necessary. In one instance you may want to look at all ARRA premiums in a month, but you also may want to see all payments that affect ARRA subsidies in that month. We can now let you slice the data both ways.

Sarah Knight is the latest team member to go under the spotlight treatment. Sarah joined Travis in August 2006 and is responsible for Travis’ written materials. As the Marketing Coordinator, she produces our newsletters, emails, and the Travis Software Blog. Sarah also updates our websites and community forums, coordinates the Professional Services Department, and makes sure our user manuals are up to date.

WebCOBRA.com has always allowed you to disburse payment and premium amounts to Sponsor/Carriers or Client/Employers with the easy-to-use Premium Disbursement wizard.

Now, this process just got a little easier with the two new Premium Disbursement options that were recently added to your WebCOBRA.com system. Both of these new options will allow you to either include or exclude subsidy amounts in disbursement calculations and reports.

The Plan Exclusion feature, which was originally discussed here, will allow you to exclude domestic partners and other ineligible dependents from receiving the 65% ARRA subsidy. This feature was released as a part of our continuing effort to update the WebCOBRA.com system so that you can administer ARRA subsidies more efficiently than ever!

In our opinion, Travis provides the best benefit administration systems on the market, and we have consistently provided support for those products in an evolving way over Travis’ nearly 23 years in business.

In order to keep Travis Support evolving, we’re making a clarification as to what Travis Support Representatives will require in order to accept a support case that requires more investigation than one phone call can provide.

When you are adding a takeover QB Group into WebCOBRA, you may want to print a takeover letter and a new set of coupons so the enrolled QB knows where to send payments. Previously, you had to go into the QB’s screen to schedule the coupon set, but now you can schedule it from the QB Add Wizard screen itself!