Auto-enrolment Isn’t Just For Christmas.

A short one to tide you over until New Year.

Do you know your Staging Date? Great, now you can (almost) forget it again!

In my opinion, Staging dates should be renamed as ‘Starting Dates’.  

So many of the employers that we meet seem to think once they reach their Staging Date and go through the initial auto-enrolment, then that’s the end of it!

If this was the case then things would be simple but unfortunately this is not the case as it kicks off a whole new way of thinking when looking at your internal procedures.

Auto-enrolment and in particular your Staging Date signifies the beginning of changes to each and every one of your company’s future payroll processes and MUST become part of the everyday business as usual process for payroll, HR & finance.  

You  therefore need to appreciate this and in turn have a full understanding of the long term impact of what will be required going forward ensuring you have put in place robust processes to help you manage the correct outcomes to meet the legislative requirements.

Rob Barksfield

Auto-enrolment Consultant

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456

Email:  contactus@broadstoneltd.co.uk

Data, data, data.

That’s a mantra we seem to live by in our office at the moment. 

You probably have something similar in your firm! But for auto-enrolment, data is king. The assessment & auto-enrolment of your workers all has to be done as part of the payroll process 

– as if you weren’t already pushed for time. So your auto-enrolment assessment needs to be slick and easily manageable.

The one way you can make this easier for yourself is to improve the quality of the employee data you hold on file. 

Post the Real Time Initiative (RTI) this should be the norm, but as we find out pretty much every day at the moment it isn’t. There are still bits of information missing here and there, which slow down the process.

Rob Barksfield

Auto-enrolment Consultant

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456

Email:  contactus@broadstoneltd.co.uk

So Here It Comes

I don’t know how large your company is, but for the majority of medium sized employers in the UK, auto-enrolment crunch time is 2014. By the time you read this, approximately 18000 employers have been through this process. 

Now this sounds a lot, but it’s the equivalent of the employers staging in six weeks of 2014.

Pension providers are about to get busy and you should start hearing more about the “capacity crunch”. 

We will start seeing something that no one outside the pensions industry expected – providers turning business away in droves.

For pension providers it’s simply a case of profitable business, with some small employers paying minimal contributions, it’s just not in their interests to open a new pension scheme, their break even time on that business might stretch up to ten years.

So who will take the business and who will still be standing at the end of 2014?

Rob Barksfield

Auto-enrolment Consultant

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456

Email:  contactus@broadstoneltd.co.uk