Payroll Blogs | Sussex Payroll

You are here: Home > Payroll Blogs

Auto Enrolment: What if no staff are eligible?

Written by Tania

Many small employers may have employees that are not eligible for automatic enrolment and therefore assume that they do not need to set up a pension. Whilst there is no need to set up a pension if you have staff that are not eligible because they are too young or do not earn enough, those employees can still ask to go into a pension scheme. If this happens, you will need to set one up at this point. If your member earns more than £112 a week or £486 a month, you must make contributions to the scheme as well. If they earn less than this, you can choose whether you want to contribute or not. What if no staff are eligible? Even if you don’t have any staff to automatically enrol, you will still need to complete the following tasks:

* You must write to all your staff to let them know they have not been automatically enrolled but can ask to go into a pension scheme. For more information go to write to your staff

* You must complete your declaration of compliance to let The Pensions Regulator know that you have met your legal duties. For more information go to declaration of compliance

You must check the ages and earnings of your staff aged between 22 and state pension age every time you run your payroll to see if anyone who wasn’t eligible for automatic enrolment at your staging date has since become eligible. You must enrol and write to them within six weeks from the day they become eligible.

New E-Payslip website

Written by Tania

The e-payslips site has been revamped with a new look and feel. The new URL is my.ePayslips.com

When logging into the new site you can continue to use your current login ID and PIN.

LOGO
As part of the new look it is possible to add a logo to every page and change the colour of pages to reflect the company.

THEME
A number of themes are available to reflect your company’s colours.

SET UP CONTACT POINT
We now have an option to add a name, email address and telephone number of a member of staff or department. This will inform employees who to contact if they have any questions.

PIN RESET
Employees are now able to add some additional details via the website which will allow them to reset their PIN through the site. Therefore if an employee forgets their PIN they no longer have to call payroll they can instead select the link ‘Reset your PIN’ and enter their security details. If the details are correct an email will be sent directly to the employee with their new temporary PIN. The employer will no longer see an employee’s PIN after they have changed their temporary PIN. If an employee advises they have forgotten their PIN you can select the employee from the grid and select ‘Reset PIN’. This will generate a new temporary PIN for the employee. If an employee says they cannot access their account you can check if the account is locked by selecting ‘Check lock’.

PDF copies of Payslips
Employees and employers can now select ‘view as pdf’ to download a copy of a payslip or P60 which can be saved and/or printed.

Please now let all your employees know that they can use the new site my.ePayslips.com

Summer Budget Summary

Written by Tania

The Chancellor’s summer budget means several changes that will affect employers from April 2016.

1. Introduction of a new compulsory National Living Wage for workers aged 25 and above. Currently, the National Minimum Wage for employees that are 21 years old and over is £6.50 an hour, increasing to £6.70 in October 2015. For those 25 years old and over, this will mean a further increase to £7.20 in April 2016.

2. To assist employers with this additional cost, the new wage will be offset by an increase to the Employment Allowance from £2000 to £3000 per year and Corporation Tax being cut to 18%, a 2% reduction on the current rate.

3. Personal Allowance will increase from £10,600 to £11,000 in April 2016 and to £11,200 in April 2017.

4. The basic rate limit will increase from £31,785 to £32,000 in April 2016 and to £32,400 in April 2017.

5. The higher rate threshold will increase from £42,385 to £43,000 in April 2016 and to £43,600 in April 2017.

6. From April 2016 companies where the director is the sole employee will no longer be able to claim the Employment Allowance.

Auto enrolment: It’s the Law!

Written by Tania

I recently read a scary statistic from an auto-enrolment survey which said 1 in 10 SMEs plan to ignore auto-enrolment completely whilst 11% of small business owners are still unaware of what auto-enrolment even is. Please do not let this be you. If you have somehow managed to miss all the national TV and radio advertising, billboards or official letters from The Pensions Regulator telling you of your duties, or forgot about it, thinking you don’t need to do anything, you could be running the risk of leaving it too late and receiving some nasty penalties for breaking the law.

We urge you to act on any letter you receive from The Pensions Regulator informing you of your ‘Staging Date’ and what your responsibilities are as an employer and what you must do and when. You must think about this now if you haven’t already and allow yourself at least 6 months to get everything in place in time.

This guide will help you get started.

If you do not already have a pension scheme in place, you must first choose a pension scheme. Once you have a suitable scheme in place you must inform your payroll provider.
For our clients we will provide the following assistance:

* Assess all workers each time we process the payroll
* Auto-enrol them into the pension scheme if and when they are eligible
* Make the necessary deductions from the payroll
* Provide pension reports
* Provide the required payroll file to submit to the pension provider
* Provide correspondence letters for new joiners

We cannot stress enough how important it is for you to think about your workplace pension duties as an employer now. It’s the law!

Auto enrolment for Directors?

Written by Tania

Since Automatic enrolment will affect many more small employers in the next couple of years, there is some confusion regarding those companies with only one or two directors. We recently spoke to The Pensions Regulator who gave us their clarification on this.

The Pensions Regulator will write to ALL employers informing them of their staging date at least 12-18 months before that date. They will expect employers to start planning and getting a pension scheme in place for their workers and to register that pension scheme within 5 months of the Staging date to avoid penalties and breaking the law. If there are only directors in the company, none of whom are workers for the purposes of automatic enrolment, then you can inform The Pensions Regulator by emailing customersupport@autoenrol.tpr.gov.uk stating the following:

1. Confirm your company is not an employer for the purposes of automatic enrolment for one of the following reasons:
* There is only one director and there are no other staff working for the company
* The only people working for the company are directors and none of them has an employment contract
* The only people working for the company are directors and only one of them has an employment contract
* The company has ceased trading (include date ceased)
* If you believe there is another reason why you believe you do not have any automatic enrolment duties, provide a brief explanation

2. The letter code for the company. This is a 10 digit number found on all letters sent from The Pensions Regulator
3. The PAYE scheme number
4. The companies house number
5. The name, email address, address and telephone number of contact at the company

If the company’s circumstances change so that there are at least two people working for the company under contracts of employment then you will need to inform The Pensions Regulator as soon as possible.