Auto Enrolment – Assessing Employees before the Staging Date
With the introduction of Auto Enrolment, most employers across the UK will now have additional costs each pay period. It is important that your clients know how much auto enrolment will cost their business so that they can plan ahead and prepare for their new duties. Employers will want to know, ahead of time, who is to be enrolled and how much the contributions will cost them.
A useful tool that payroll bureaus can use when communicating with clients about their auto enrolment services is BrightPay’s pre-assessment report. This report can be prepared in BrightPay at the click of a button and gives an estimated snapshot of what auto enrolment will look like in advance of reaching the staging date.
The tool uses pay amounts from the current pay period to give the employer an idea of how much auto enrolment will cost each pay period. It will give you a breakdown of each employee’s worker category, along with their pensionable pay, their qualifying earnings in the pay period, and the employee and employer contribution amounts. BrightPay uses the pensionable pay, qualifying earnings and pension contribution amounts from the current pay period for each employee, and so can be subject to change.
This is a useful document for payroll bureaus to send to clients before they reach their staging date. The report will give them an estimated overview of how much auto enrolment might cost them, and allow them to plan accordingly. It also includes some general information about auto enrolment such as worker category definitions, qualifying earnings and minimum contribution rates.
The pre-assessment tool can also be used before staging to see if a pension scheme needs to be set up. If an employer has no eligible jobholders, then there is no need to register with a pension provider and set up a scheme. The pre-assessment report can therefore save payroll bureaus time spent on tedious, unnecessary tasks. However if a non eligible employee wishes to opt into a pension scheme, then the employer must set a pension scheme and comply with the employees rights. Read: No eligible jobholders – What do you need to do?
After staging, BrightPay allows you to perform a post-assessment report, which gives you a snapshot of what auto enrolment looked like at the clients staging date. This includes details of the worker category for each employee, assessment dates, and postponed employees. This is extremely useful when completing the declaration of compliance.
PDF Example: Pre-assessment Report | Post Assessment Report
You can also watch this video to find out how to use BrightPay’s pre-assessment tool.
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