Auto-enrolment — comply and save

The auto-enrol­ment leg­is­la­tion applies to all employ­ers. There is no “do noth­ing” option as there are no opt-out rules for employ­ers and hefty fines can be imposed. On the face of it, enrolling employ­ees may seem like a sim­ple thing to do. But, while this in itself can be achieved with­out too much fuss, com­ply­ing with all the rules is far more of a chal­lenge, par­tic­u­lar­ly for busi­ness­es with­out ded­i­cat­ed in-house pen­sion depart­ments. This is because the rules and reg­u­la­tions are com­plex.

For exam­ple:

• All employ­ers will be required to car­ry out new employ­ee assess­ments reg­u­lar­ly, some of which will need new data to be stored and analysed, includ­ing the spe­cif­ic state pen­sion age of employ­ees

• New employ­ee com­mu­ni­ca­tions must be car­ried out, with manda­to­ry con­tent for three dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of work­er

• Con­tri­bu­tions must be cal­cu­lat­ed and paid in respect of each employ­ee – those from the employ­er and employ­ee

• Opt-out and opt-in requests must be processed

• New record keep­ing rules apply, with some records need­ing to be kept for a min­i­mum of six years.

All in all, the rules are detailed and ardu­ous. As an indi­ca­tion of this, The Pen­sions Reg­u­la­tor, the body respon­si­ble for over­see­ing work­place pen­sions, pub­lish­es well over 250 pages of guid­ance notes to help employ­ers.

To help you under­stand the issues and to pro­vide easy-to-digest infor­ma­tion, we have pub­lished a num­ber of guides which you may find use­ful. Click on the front cov­ers below to fol­low the links to the doc­u­ments.

AN ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION

The last of the doc­u­ments high­lights the amount of time small to medi­um-sized busi­ness­es will need to devote to auto-enrol­ment, should they choose to try and do it all them­selves. It is so much time as to rep­re­sent a gen­uine threat to busi­ness­es’ core activ­i­ties.

We recog­nise this and so our ser­vice pro­vides a com­plete solu­tion. We’ll help com­pa­nies com­ply with all their legal respon­si­bil­i­ties and we do much more besides. We pro­vide cor­po­rate con­sul­tan­cy so you can set a strat­e­gy with our exper­tise, tak­ing advan­tage of options and design fea­tures, such as use of “post­pone­ment” to defer your auto-enrol­ment imple­men­ta­tion. This con­sul­tan­cy will give you con­fi­dence and makes the prac­ti­cal set up eas­i­er and more effi­cient.

We’ll help com­pa­nies com­ply with all their legal respon­si­bil­i­ties and we do much more besides

We pro­vide a com­plete soft­ware pack­age to han­dle all the logis­tics. Called CREATE, our soft­ware han­dles all the analy­sis, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and record-keep­ing. CREATE also pro­vides a range of help­ful infor­ma­tion and online videos to sup­port your employ­ees. This is backed up with a Tele­phone Helpline – a very valu­able ser­vice in itself as it stops time being tak­en up with­in your busi­ness and pre­vents rule breach­es; for exam­ple, auto-enrol­ment coer­cion rules and the wider Finan­cial Con­duct Author­i­ty require­ments.

In short, we help employ­ers and employ­ees with a com­plete auto-enrol­ment ser­vice.

COST SAVINGS

In addi­tion to help­ing employ­ers ful­fil their oner­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties, we also con­sult on and deliv­er ways for employ­ers and employ­ees to save mon­ey. For exam­ple, we use an HM Rev­enue & Cus­toms-approved process to auto­mate the pay­ment of pen­sion con­tri­bu­tions by salary exchange.

We don’t know of any oth­er ser­vice provider who offers this.

By automat­ing salary exchange – our process also pro­vides the nec­es­sary doc­u­men­ta­tion – the sav­ings, com­pared to pay­ment of pen­sion con­tri­bu­tions by the net pay­ment method, can real­ly stack up. For a quick guide, vis­it our online cal­cu­la­tor by click­ing on the pic­ture. All you need to enter is your pay­roll and num­ber of employ­ees.

For our com­plete end-to-end ser­vice to solve your auto-enrol­ment chal­lenge and to keep your costs low, please call us on 0845 850 0884

Cre­ative Auto Enrol­ment

www.creativeautoenrolment.co.uk

AN ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION