How do I prepare for automatic enrolment?

Summary

The following article explains how to set up Platinum for the new employer duties dictated by The Workplace Pension Reform, known as Automatic Enrolment.

More Information

See information about Automatic Enrolment on The Pensions Regulator website.

Staging Date

The Staging Date is the date from which your new duties as an employer are set to begin. If you don't already know it, see What is my staging date? on The Pensions Regulator website to find out.

Once you know your Staging Date, you must enter this in Platinum so that it can start aiding your new required business processes.

• Go to " Payroll Parameters/Maintenance Company Parameters Pension Schemes".
• At "Automatic Enrolment Staging Date" enter your Staging Date.

Postponement

Once you have identified your staging date, you will need to decide whether you intend to use postponement at your staging date in respect of one, some or all of your workers.

Platinum will let you set or amend postponement details in " Run Payroll". It will automatically use postponement to align the joining of employees to pension schemes to your normal payroll periods, if your Staging Date happens to fall partway through a period. You can also set the postponement date to a date up to three months after your Staging Date if you wish.

Identifying Workers

You must look at the contractual relationships you have with the people working for you to ensure those who are considered "workers", as far as the Automatic Enrolment regulations are concerned, are correctly identified. Platinum initially marks all employee records as "workers", but for any that this does not apply you can remove this classification.

• Go to " Payroll Parameters/Maintenance Employee Amendments"
• For all records that are not "workers" according to the Automatic Enrolment regulations, set "Worker" to 'No'.

Initial Assessment of Workforce

You may want to take an initial view of your workforce to determine what preparations you will need to make before your Staging Date.

• Go to " Payroll Procedures/Reports Payroll Report Generator"
• Start report 'Auto Enrolment Assessment'

Pension Scheme for Automatic Enrolment

Having completed the initial assessment, you should know whether you are likely to have an automatic enrolment duty from your staging date.

If so you will need to select a pension scheme that meets the automatic enrolment and qualifying criteria.

• Go to " Payroll Parameters/Maintenance Company Parameters Pension Schemes".
• Enter or amend the pension parameters for your automatic enrolment scheme.
• At "Automatic Enrolment Scheme" enter the number of the pension scheme.

See also

• How do I setup a Pension Scheme in Platinum?
• How do I Run a Payroll Period?

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Keywords AND Misspellings

Workplace Pension Reform, Automatic Enrolment, Auto Enrolment, Pension scheme, payroll, parameters