Don't Fall Foul of Your Auto-enrolment Duties!
Auto-enrolment affects all UK employers with at least one employee.
The rules are complicated, the deadlines are tight and there are fixed and variable penalties if you get it wrong. No ifs, no buts. Get it wrong and you run the risk of being fined.
Your first priority task is to check your key dates with the pensions regulator www.thepensionsregulator.co.uk/en/employers/duties-checker
Now that you know your key dates, what you need to know is that there are another 1.8 million employers facing exactly the same challenges as you.
There is a limited number of providers of workplace pensions to meet this demand. Leaving this until your Staging Date could mean that you are left without much choice. Getting it all set up today means that you can choose the right scheme for the right reasons.
Our scheme is available to ALL employers today and can be set up in less than 10 minutes and left on the shelf until your Staging Date comes along.
Of course, you can offer this scheme to your employees immediately and let them start their employee pension contributions early. Remember, your auto-enrolment duties as a UK employer don't start until your Staging Date.
Auto-enrolment is a cycle. It is not JUST a payroll issue; it's not JUST a pension issue; it's BOTH !
Let's look at what happens and where:
Payroll
You pay your staff. But now, within payroll you have to assess all of your employees based on age and earnings every time you pay them - and work out who you have to auto-enrol. If you do have to auto-enrol them, then before you can pay them, you need to make a pension deduction as part of the minimum overall contribution that must be made on behalf of EVERY eligible member of staff.
All payroll software has within it a section to do these deductions and may be able to meet some of the auto-enrolment compliance duties, which we will explain next.
Auto-enrolment Compliance
Your employer duties are complex, but in summary your main tasks are to:
- assess (based on income)
- communicate - explain this to all of your staff
- enrol the relevant staff and make contributions
- deal with your staff that want to "opt-out" - or indeed, "opt-in"
- keep records of all of this for at least 6 years
- report to the regulator how you have met your auto-enrolment duties
Not forgetting - you have to go through this whole process every three years. This is known as re-enrolment. So, if ever there was a time for a piece of software to do all of this for you - now is that time!
If this isn't provided by your payroll provider or software, you can select our auto-enrolment assessment and communications tool when you set up your pension scheme. If chosen, three month's postponement for Staging, New Joiner and Age & Earnings triggers are applied by default.
Tick a simple box during your set up and your pension scheme will come with this option. This will just leave you with the ongoing task of uploading a single spreadsheet into our software every time you pay your staff.
Pension
So, you have paid your staff; you have made your deductions; you have covered all of your compliance duties - what next?
The simple task of every time you pay your staff and make those deductions, you need to send the contributions to your chosen pension provider, along with a breakdown of how much and who these apply to. Not forgetting, you could get fined if you fall behind.
So, don't delay - get the easy part out of the way - set up your pension with us today!
