The auto enrolment dilemma – In-house or outsource?

Auto enrolment is going to affect 1.8 million businesses between now and 2018. The dilemma for small businesses is to tackle auto enrolment head on within their business or to outsource the responsibilities entirely.

When the larger businesses staged in 2012, many of them had their own internal pensions advisers and departments to deal with the auto enrolment legislation.

Understandably, this isn't a luxury afforded by the sizes of business that are due to reach their staging date between now and 2018. This poses the dilemma of whether these businesses should outsource their auto enrolment responsibilities to someone else or to try and tackle it head on, internally.

But what are the pros and cons of each option? Let's take a look.

Outsourcing your auto enrolment responsibilities

Outsourcing your auto enrolment can be a great option for you and your business if you are simply too busy to set up an internal auto enrolment solution. This is because you can hand over your responsibilities to a trusted third party who will take care of your auto enrolment duties. This will mean that your business remains compliant and avoids unnecessary non-compliance fines.

In addition, you can also rid yourself of having to process all of the extra pension communications that need to be sent out (by law) to the right employees at the right times in their auto enrolment journey. Outsourcing also removes the stress that could possibly come with running auto enrolment manually or through an expensive middleware solution (this is a solution that runs separately to your payroll that vastly increases the amount of work that needs to be done when you run your payroll).

Finally, by outsourcing your payroll you save a great deal of time that you can spend on other aspects of your business. This is possibly the main benefit to outsourcing your auto enrolment.

To find out more information about whether outsourcing is the right decision for you, read the IRIS guide "Should your company outsource its auto enrolment responsibilities?". 

Download the free guide

You can also attend the free webinar on whether your business (or GP practice) should outsource auto enrolment:

Should your business outsource auto enrolment (11:00am on 18th September)

Should your GP practice outsource auto enrolment (14:00pm on 21st September)

Running your auto enrolment process internally

Initially this may sound like a daunting, unnecessary process. After all, why would you want to run a process that you don't know much about when you can just let IRIS do it for you?

The main benefit behind running auto enrolment yourself is down to the control that you have over your payroll. If you run the payroll, by using the IRIS AE Suite™ auto enrolment really doesn't take any extra time at all. This is because the IRIS AE Suite™ automatically assesses your employees' eligibility for enrolment into a workplace pensions scheme each time your run the payroll - completely behind the scenes. In addition to this, it automatically distributes the necessary pension communications at the correct times online to an employee's secure portal.

Furthermore, because auto enrolment within the IRIS AE Suite™ is processed at the same time as running your payroll, payslips and P60s can also be delivered electronically with the pension communications. This vastly reduces your payroll costs without the need to print, sort and post as many communications to your employees.

Finally, the pension output file is created within the software that can then be uploaded to your pension provider. From Winter 2015, NEST Web Services will allow you to be able to send your pension output file directly from within the IRIS AE Suite™ which will even further streamline your payroll process.

To find out more about why running your auto enrolment process internally could be the best decision for you to help you avoid non-compliance, why not download our guide "The 6 auto enrolment traps". 

Download the free guide