The importance of a good payroll provider

With the changes in pensions legislation that have occurred over the last few years, the role of the payroll provider has changed in its importance to the company pension scheme. Before they enjoyed something of a backseat role, but now they have been thrust to the forefront of a company’s dealings with its pension provider.

Automatic enrolment has added extra layers of complexity into the process of assessing eligibility, managing the membership, data, and contribution payments for pension schemes.

As with any dealings with an individual or firm, you get out what you put in and with payroll providers it is no different. Employers who bring their payroll providers in to this process early, often find that the teething issues most pension schemes encounter can be greatly reduced.

However it is not just the employer’s responsibility to bring their payroll providers in on the pensions process, it is also the responsibility of the pension providers themselves.  For some it can be as simple as inclusion on regular conference calls, and for others far more specific inclusion and training is required.

Encouraging a greater awareness of the automatic enrolment process on the part of the payroll provider should be the overriding aim of both the employer and the pension provider respectively as auto enrolment becomes more established in workplace pensions.

Robert Simmons
Corporate Pensions Administrator

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456
Email: contactus [@] broadstone.co.uk

Auto Enrolment: Thinking about data & systems yet?

My dad is a systems integration engineer and right now I can really empathise with him! His job basically involves taking a number of components that were never intended to work together and trying to force them to work seamlessly as part of a process.

The parallels are there for auto enrolment pensions at the moment, with trying to integrate the HR systems with payroll system to get all the necessary employee information out to input into the auto enrolment system. Sounds simple when you start to talk about it, right? Then you realise that yes, these systems can export some of the data (usually not everything that you want), but never in the format required or quite in the right way to make the job straightforward.

I find that conversations about pensions data & systems early in the auto enrolment planning stage are an absolute must.  Have a call or a meeting with your payroll provider, auto enrolment consultant and pension provider as soon as possible to understand the challenges ahead.

 

Rob Barksfield

Auto-enrolment Consultant

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456

Email:  contactus [@] broadstoneltd.co.uk

We’re going through changes…

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with an employer, which shows how much you can tell people something and they don’t listen. I’ve been working with this particular employer for several months looking at their data issues and how they can assess their employees each payroll cycle.

At the beginning of every project I outline to every client how the assessment process will work and one of the questions I make a point of asking is “how much spare time do you have between payroll cut-off and the time you pay”. The answer from payroll is indubitably “never enough”.  

Auto-enrolment imposes new duties on the employer, which must take place between the payroll cut off and pay date. The chances are that you might have to make some serious changes to the way the company works to accommodate this. This might mean bringing the cut off date forward or being tougher on timesheets. 

Whatever happens, you are going to have to consider how auto-enrolment is going to fit into your business as usual in a workable fashion.

 

Rob Barksfield

Auto-enrolment Consultant 

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3972

Email:  contactus [@] broadstoneltd.co.uk

Pension Auto-Enrolment - Non-Executive Directors Beware!

Only this week we have had a number of discussions with clients, who hold non-executive directorships, who were unaware that by automatically becoming a member of a pension scheme they could seriously affect their own pension arrangements.

This is because of the roll-out of auto-enrolment pensions (a new law requiring every employer to automatically enrol workers into a workplace pension scheme).

We are therefore advising all of our clients who have substantial pension benefits, protected lifetime allowances (the maximum you are permitted to have in pension assets by value without a future tax charge) and have one or more Non-Executive Directorship (NED) roles to check this out with their respective payroll departments.  This is to ensure they are not automatically enrolled in a pension scheme.

There are exemptions in place that are likely to cover most NEDs, however our concern is whether our clients, and the companies they are working with, are aware of these exemptions.  If they are not, there is a chance they could inadvertently become members of a pension scheme.

For clients who have protected lifetime allowances (potentially uncapped), being auto-enrolled could result in the loss of this protection and a reduced lifetime allowance of £1.25m.  In monetary terms this could easily lead to a six figure future tax charge!

Please do give us a call if you are a NED and please click on the link below if you would like to learn more on this and other planning ideas to consider before 5 April 2014.

Click here for 10 Planning Ideas to do before 5 April 2014.

Antony Summers
Private Client Partner

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456
Email:  getintouch [at] broadstoneltd.co.uk

Got your employee email addresses? It's crazy not to.

Over the past few months of working on auto-enrolment projects, we’ve turned up one piece of information that most employers have space for on the payroll file, but few are ever filled in - employee email addresses. Unless you have electronic payslips, they’re mostly a nice to have on a payroll file aren’t they? Not for much longer…

The default communication strategy for the majority of UK pension providers is email. For them it’s simply a matter of cost, the fewer paper communications they have to send out, the less money they have to spend on auto-enrolment. So their default is to send as much as they possibly can be email to your employees. If you want to send paper statutory notifications to your employees, you have to print & post them yourself (another job you didn’t want!). Don’t forget that these communications are a legal requirement so if you don’t send them out, then you’re liable to get fined.

So having employee emails on file, whether work or personal, will make your life so much easier.
 

Rob Barksfield

Auto-enrolment Consultant

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7893 3456

Email:  contactus@broadstoneltd.co.uk

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