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January 6, 2016 - 2:37pm

As the new year approaches, we wanted to inform you of a couple of items that warrant your attention.

First, as these are the early days in regards to the Affordable Care Act, one of our astute Spectrum clients noticed an issue in Spectrum that came too late to make a product change. This is connected to the 1095C forms and the need to print and collate those with the W2's. Unfortunately, Spectrum does not have the option to print W2's and 1095C's utilizing the same sort order so it made it difficult to collate a large number of employee W2's and 1095C's. To provide a solution, two of our consultants created custom reports that now sort the 1095C in either SSN or Name Alpha order to mirror the options for W2 printing.

Please download the custom reports to have them available when you reach this point in your 1095C processing. Instructions for adding these reports to your Spectrum installation are included on the download page.

We also wanted to share a few areas that we'd recommend you review in regards to your Spectrum security setup and continue to monitor on a periodic basis. When the 14.16 service pack was applied to your system, you may have noticed a change to the database in which key information such as SSN were encrypted for all users. As we continue to review our security policies we would encourage you to do the same.

We recommend you run through the following check list:

  • Run the Company Security Authorization Report (System Administration -> Security -> Company Security Authorization Report) – review to ensure there are no unrecognized employees or employees that have left your company to ensure their accounts are deleted or made inactive. Also, ensure users have the appropriate security settings (or security scheme if schemes are used) assigned to their logon id’s.
  • Require Strong Passwords (System Administration -> Security -> Password Policy) – To ensure your users are setting non-trivial passwords, set Spectrum up to require Strong Passwords. If a user’s password is trivial, on their next logon, they will be prompted to create a new password following the strong password rules. Also consider setting minimum password length to 8 and set expiration of passwords at 60 days.
  • Use Password Encryption (System Administration -> Security -> Password Policy) – To ensure passwords remain secure, please check the Use Password Encryption check box
  • Review Operator Maintenance for weak passwords (System Administration -> Security -> Operator Maintenance – click GO to search all) – scan the Strong Password column for entries that do not say YES and notify those users to change their passwords
  • Remove or disable trivial logons to the Test / Sample Companies – ABC, CCD, XYZ, DCI are typical test operators that were setup during implementation and training and many of these had trivial passwords. As is the recommended policy, these should have been disabled once going into production. Please review if you have these companies and trivial logons / passwords and disable or replace with new user names and strong passwords.
  • Ensure your audit log is running (System Administration -> Security -> Audit Log) – run for the past 5 days and ensure you have activity. If there is no data, please contact support for help.

When moving to the next service pack, we plan to force the above password recommendations to ensure your systems are secure for both you, your employees and your customers. By following the above steps, you will see no change from a password and test company perspective when you update Spectrum in 2016. If you decide to wait, the password changes will be automatically applied in the first service pack of 2016.

If you have any questions please contact Support at (800) 352-8939.

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Mitchell Brothers