Enrolling workers and sending contributions

Pay Categories

Before running the payrun  and assessing your workers for Auto Enrolment, you will need to ensure that your Pay Categories are set to be included for Employer and Employee pension contributions.

If you go to 'Payroll Settings' > 'Pay Run Settings' > 'Pay categories' and choose the relevant Pay Category (or pay categories if you need more than one as pensionable). You can then select the Employer and Employee Pensionable tick boxes, and save.

Assessing and enrolling workers

If you have employees who have already been enrolled in a pension  scheme you will need to:

• Go to the Employees Details Page > Pay Run Settings > Pension Settings
• Set the assessment method to Manually
• Choose the relevant assessment status
• Choose the assessment date
• Is this employee already enrolled in the pension scheme - select 'yes'
• Choose the correct Contribution Plan for this employee, to match the Group at the pension provider
• Check that the contribution percentages are correct and press 'Save'

If you have employees who need to be assessed in payroll:

• Go to the Employees Details Page > Pay Run Settings > Pension Settings
• Set the assessment method to Automatic
• Choose the correct Contribution Plan for this employee and press 'Save'

Statutory communications

QBO Advanced Payroll will automatically generate any required statutory communications for eligible, non-eligible and entitled workers once the pay run is finalised.

If you want to switch off the automatic notices or you want to manually generate them, you can do this in the Employee File > HMRC Documents > Auto Enrolment section. 

Sending pension data each pay run

When you finalise the pay run QBO Advanced Payroll ensure you tick 'submit via PensionSync' and PensionSync will automatically send the pension data to be processed by the pension provider. 

If you use Nest, PensionSync's Nest Direct Debit Approval feature can also approve the payment for you. 

How do I know it has been processed correctly?

In the finalised pay run you will be able to see a status to tell you whether the PensionSync process has completed or not.

If there are any errors you will be able to view an error report explaining the problem. 

You can use the Resubmit to PensionSync option to resend the pension data as required. 

You can also access the PensionSync Dashboard for submission histories, preferences and other tools to help you manage your pension administration.