Hi there
Does anyone know if Moneysoft can intergrate with Now:Pensions please?
Many thanks
Replies (4)
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Not yet I think
I spoke to Moneysoft about a month ago re auto enrolment and I don't think anything will automatically "talk" to a pension provider. At least they are honest about this.
Us poor sods on Sage are still having to work out how to set up employees manually on the pensions websites at the start of AE and then have to adjust csv files manually and download them to the website each month. I have looked at IRIS and I am sure that they can link direct to the pension provider website, but at a very hefty price.
If I were you I would use Moneysoft systems to the maximum, using Now import format to get data in and use the Now website suggested letters.
If you aren't going to charge the client a fortune for doing this, please think again. It will take you hours to get accustomed to AE if you've not been through it yet, and with my experience on Nest and the Peoples pension there could be bugs in the Now program that could hold you up.
Our clients have no idea what aggro this is. What we need to explain to them is the compliance requirements are massive and if they want us to do this it will all take a lot of time.
I do expect Moneysoft people to be quite helpful as long as you accept there is a limit to what their software will do. At least they aren't charging you a fortune for things they can't deliver.
So give them a call to discuss my suggestion.
Payroll
Paye processing is something that we have defaulted to under protest and usually for little return simply to satisfy a client need. We barely cover the cost of the software and that has been all well and good as it just took a few minutes to process.
Those days are over, with RTI and AE this is now a major job in its own right and will become a time vampire.Clients need to be appraised in full and must appreciate that the work involved will mean an increase in fees.
We have taken the option of outsourcing all our payroll as we simply do not have the time to become involved, It has so far cost us two clients, but one of those rang me on the 27th Jan for some advice to help him complete his SA return as he didn't see the need to pay me to do it for him, so I know he would also expect me to run AE for him for nothing as well.
What is the general opinion on this ?
We've just tried
to set up a client via the Now pensions portal. The first issue that we came across is that we had to set up all of the payroll periods in the current tax year with payment date, processing date and first day of pay period. As it's a weekly payroll, that meant setting up 52 periods - manually! Not happy about that, as you can imagine.
Looking at Moneysoft there is a box on the employer details tab to enter a scheme code for Now Pensions. That looked promising. There is also an option under Tools>Auto Enrolment > Generate Upload files to produce a csv file. That looked even more promising
However, the upload to the Now portal failed because the columns were in the wrong order. We should be able to fix that by tinkering manually but at the moment it doesn't seem to work. The portal imports csv files with or without a header row but Moneysoft only produces one without a header row and in the wrong order for Now. There is a format for NEST at the present time but not one for Now, just a generic format to tinker with. I expect that they will do one for other formats but in fairness to them their target market isn't the size of employer that has a stagign date now
Endorse Moonbeams comments about charging. It's going to take a long time to set up and is going to require manual intervention all the time
some success
I agree with Cloudcounter about having to setup the payroll periods manually - ridiculous.
I've successfully uploaded to NOW tonight, after some trial + error, and much referring to the inbound interface spec (http://www.nowpensions.com/implementation-employer-assessment):
In Moneysoft, ignore the Generate Upload Files > Enrolment - this doesn't offer a NOW-specifc format. Instead, use the Contributions option, and select the NOW Layout. That creates a CSV with all the mandatory fields and in the right order. For my initial data upload, I opened this CSV in Excel and added the header row, then amended data as follows:
Cleared column N POSTPONEMENT DATE (because a date in here is invalid unless the ASSESSMENT field is also populated)
Entered Y or N in column W SALARY SACRIFICE (mandatory field)
Entered the pay code I'd already created in NOW, into column AG PAY CODE. I haven't found anywhere in Moneysoft that populates this field in the CSV file.
Column AH ER CODE is populated by Moneysoft from each employee's Auto-enrolment tab > NOW Pensions Employee code (not where I expected it to pull from - means manually entering it for every employee). This is the employer's 4-character reference supplied by NOW.
Column AI SCHEME CODE is populated by Moneysoft from Employer Details >Aut-enrolment tab > NOW scheme code. Leave blank unless the employer has arranged multiple tiers with NOW.
Hope the above may save you some time.