Finance & Operations

Pension Auto-Enrolment Chaos Hits Payroll

Dorcass Bell · 1d ago

By July, with phase two of UK auto-enrolment live, our new starter run is flagging 25-year-olds on variable shifts as eligible even when they opted out. HMRC's lower earnings limit and the new all-worker trigger don't line up with our legacy payroll template, so Finance can't reconcile pension deductions without a manual exception file before month-end. How are Payroll and Finance teams validating eligibility, opt-outs and deductions at scale when the old templates still bite?

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2 replies

Carl Webb · 1d ago

We are not seeing that level of pain, so maybe it's how the checks are sequenced.
We run a pre-payroll exception report from BrightPay and it flags opt-outs before the file ever hits Sage, which cuts out the manual reconciliation headache.

Deborah Bryant · 1d ago

Pricing defence: we introduced a value calculator that shows ROI. When the prospect sees the math the price objection softens.