TPR: “Check your payroll process 6 months before you stage”

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) recommend that you review your payroll process around six months before your staging date.

In addition to this, they also recommend that you check your existing staff records to ensure that they are all correct and up to date. This is extremely important because there is a specific set of eligibility criteria for auto enrolment.

To be eligible for auto enrolment, you must be:

• A regular UK worker
• Aged between 22 and State Pension Age (meaning that date of birth must be correct)
• Earning above £10,000 per annum or the monthly/weekly equivalent (meaning salaries and pay information must be correct
• Not already enrolled in a pension scheme (meaning that existing pension information must be up to date)

In addition to this, when you reach your staging date, you will then need to keep records of your contributions to pension schemes to be compliant with auto enrolment legislation.

To ensure that you have a fully streamlined payroll process, you must make sure that your payroll software will run with your chosen pension provider.

Running auto enrolment within your payroll software is the most logical, time and cost saving solution because all of the data needed to assess your employees is already in the software. The information from TPRs website states:

Once you've ensured that your payroll process works with automatic enrolment, it will help you be ready to pay contributions and send data to your pension provider on a regular basis. It will also help you to automatically enrol staff as they become eligible.

The Pension Regulator then go on to recommend that you do the following:

• Ensure your staff records are correct and up to date.
• Consider using payroll software if you don’t already.
• Make sure any payroll software fully supports automatic enrolment.
• Make sure your payroll system can generate a report or file in the correct format for your pension scheme provider's system. We recommend doing this around six months before your staging date.
• If possible, generate a test file from your payroll to send to your pension provider to ensure it will work.

The IRIS AE Suite™ works within IRIS Software and automatically assesses your employee's eligibility for auto enrolment. The software also then distributes payslips and P60s electronically as well as publishing the legally required pension communications to your employee's secure online portal.

The IRIS AE Suite™ will, this Winter, incorporate NEST Web Services into the IRIS AE Suite™ which means that the all-important pension output files to NEST can be uploaded directly from the software simply with the click of a button.

You can find out more about the IRIS AE Suite™ by getting yourself a free, no obligation product demonstration by clicking the link below:

Join a free auto enrolment software demo

In the demo you will learn how the IRIS AE Suite™ will save you time and money by streamlining your auto enrolment process.