For your Finance Team—How Alice Works for Employers.
What is Alice?
Alice provides pretax benefits to employers of restaurant and frontline workers.
Alice is different:
• Most benefit companies focus on office workers.
• These companies don't work for employees with varying shifts, hours, tipped-wages, sharing employees between multiple locations, and more.
• Alice automatically sets employees benefit levels based on their spending history.
• Pretax deductions may change each pay period to adjust to changes in shifts, hours, and spend.
• Employees may connect their own credit or debit cards or get Alice Card.
• Alice makes benefits accessible to employees living paycheck-to-paycheck by reducing how far in advance funding of flex spending cards occurs.
• No open enrollment, forms, math, or use-it-or-lose it. All W2s can use it including temp workers.
• Alice works in English and Spanish, over text, with one hand, while on break.
• Employees connect spending history, Employers connect payroll and Alice handles the rest.
How does it work for employees?
If an employee is spending on their own cards:
If an employee spends using their own connected credit or debit cards, Alice uses that spending history to generate a pretax deduction and a post-tax addition in payroll for the amount they spend. The pretax deduction sets aside an amount of gross income so that its not taxed. Then, the post-tax addition puts that tax free income into the after-tax pay of the empluee. Income is protected from taxes, which raises their net pay.
If an employee is spending on Alice Card:
Alice uses the spending on Alice Card to set the pretax deduction, similar to above. That amount is protected from taxation and then held back in your payroll back account by your payroll provider awaiting your pretax benefit service provider (thats Alice!) to transfer those amounts to your pretax benefit account.
Your Alice Card funding account is provided by our partner Stripe Payments Company working with Evolve Bank & Trust, Fifth Third Bank, and Celtic Bank. These funds are not payments by your company and are not Alice's fees or funds—the source of these funds is your employees pretax deduction. You receive a transfer notice for each transfer and can see your Alice Card funding account balance on your Alice Admin Dashboard.
Your employees' deductions are used to fund their pretax eligible purchases using Alice Card.
Alice will make regular withdrawals (roughly weekly) to ensure there are adequate funds in the Alice Card funding account to cover employees' purchases.
Typically these withdrawals will be to cover recent spend, but sometimes they will also be to increase the reserve amount when you have new employees signing up for Alice Card. The nature and amount of these withdrawals will be specified in the emails we send with each withdrawal, as well as on a monthly financial report we email to your Alice administrators.
If an employee is spending on both Alice Card and their own connected credit or debit cards:
Alice lets your employees spend in the way thats most convenient for them. If they mix and match Alice Card and their own cards they will see part of their pretax deduction come back to them on thier paycheck based on their connected card spend, and part of thier pretax deduction route to your company's Alice Card funding account to pay for purchases on thier Alice Card.
If your employee has any questions, please ask them to email Alice at support@thisisalice.com for a detailed response on what happened on thier paycheck.
What does it cost for our business?
The government gives your business a payroll tax break on the amounts your employees' deduct pretax. Alice only charges you what you saved on payroll taxes. So, you are never out-of-pocket when using Alice. Your payroll system is the source of truth for the amount of deductions that have processed for that pay period. The payroll tax rates are the statutory rates published by the federal, state, and local authorities.
Your bills are always based on actual employee deductions. This means that even though your Alice bills may fluctuate from pay periods, your company still come out even! Plus, you’re offering a simple, pretax benefit that increases employee net pay at no additional cost to you.
Alice charges your connected payment method each pay period or monthly, at your option.
We will send you an email along with each invoice including an attached spreadsheet that outlines the exact calculations we used to determine your charge.
if you have any questions, please reach out at admin-support@thisisalice.com.
Can I see invoice for these Alice Card withdrawals?
We don't provide an invoice for these withdrawals, because they are not fees for service: they cover your employees' Alice Card purchases, and are effectively paid back to your company through their payroll deductions.
We do provide a breakdown of withdrawals:
- in a spreadsheet emailed to you upon each withdrawal
- in a spreadsheet attached to your monthly finance email, which goes out around the 2nd or 3rd of each month
Alice Card Reserve Deposits
• First, the Reserve Deposit amount is money that belongs to your company—those amounts are not fees to Alice and they are not amounts given to your employees.
• Why is there a Reserve Deposit? When an employee requests Alice Card, your company transfers a Reserve Deposit to its Alice Card Reserve Account so that the card can be issued to the employee. When the employee is terminated, the reserve deposit is credited back to your company. Alice never keeps this money.
• How much is the Reserve Amount? The amount of the deposit varies based on how much your employees spend for a particular location. Alice's system chooses an amount based on prior spending at that location. For the Kenmare St location, there has been high spend in the $300 range earlier this year so our system factored that in.