If your employee is enrolled in the pension scheme with an Entitled status:

• They cannot have an Eligible status until they reach 22 and have earnings greater than £833 per month.
• They can become Non Eligible if their earnings increase. You should then begin making pension contributions for them at the minimum contribution levels (if you weren’t already).

If your employee is enrolled in the pension scheme with a Non Eligible status:

• They cannot have an Eligible status until they reach 22 and have earnings greater than £833 per month.
• They cannot become Entitled, so even if their earnings drop below £520 per month. You must continue to provide pension contributions for them.

But if the employee stops active membership and then asks to join again (or leaves and then returns to your employment), they should be reassessed based on their age and earnings.

Errors during file upload

During file upload, you may see an error explaining the auto-enrolment status of your employee isn’t correct. To solve this, you should check both your payroll and the data file you’re uploading to us to make sure they contain:

• the correct date of birth
• the correct auto-enrolment status.

Then amend your data file or payroll settings and then re-submit your data file to us.

However, if you contact our support team, they can look into investigating if your file can be deleted for you.

You may want to delete a file if you have:

• greatly overpaid contributions
• greatly underpaid contributions
• included an employee on the file who has now left the company.

If payment for the contribution is processing or has cleared, we may not be able to delete your file. If you’re looking to delete the file due to incorrect contributions, you can add any missed contributions or subtract overpaid contributions on your next file submission.

It’s best suited to smaller businesses and it’s also ideal if you don’t use payroll software to manage your employees.

You simply manually type employees’ details into our system, and we’ll then suggest who needs to be put into the pension scheme and how much of a contribution should be deducted.

Is ‘enter data’ available to me?

Yes, schemes of any size can manually key in their employee data – and switch between that and file upload.

For more information see our guide manually entering employee data.

How do I switch to manually enter my employee data?

You can switch between the two using the ‘Guide & settings’ tab at the top of the enter date page.

From here, you can swap between ‘File upload’ and ‘Manual entry’.

How does your assessment tool work?

When you send us your employee data, we’ll use your employee’s age and earnings to suggest an auto-enrolment status for them. We’ll also use the worker group settings to calculate contributions for employees.

We calculate your pension contributions on the assumption that you’ve provided National Insurance (NI) numbers for each of your employees. Find out how missing NI numbers can affect pension contributions on our website.

For more information on how to use our assessment tool, please see our guide to uploading your data file.

Remember, if you run more than one payroll with different pay periods (for example, a weekly and monthly account), you’ll need separate admin accounts for us to run our assessment tool. If you need a separate admin account, get in touch and we’d be happy to help.

If this is not the first time you’ve submitted your employee data, you won’t be able to change your pay reference period (PRP) dates yourself, but we can do this for you.

Get in touch to request this.

Once a member reaches age 75, they won’t get tax relief on their contributions. Should they continue to contribute, they need to be aware that no tax relief will apply.

Employer contributions will continue to benefit from relief from corporation tax.

• Log into your Online Services account.
• From your account home page, select ‘Manage employee details’.

• We’ll show you a list of your employees and highlight employees with missing details with a .

• If you have just a few employees, click ‘select’ beside their name. You’ll then be able to add their NI number.

• If you have lots of employees, you’ll find it easier to download a list of them. Click ‘Download results’ from the top right of your screen. The list will include current employees as well as any that have left the scheme in the last 12 months.
• Then sort and filter your results by NI number in Excel – this’ll help you identify any employees we need an NI number for.
• Use the search function on the employee details page within Online Services to find an employee and add their NI number.

If you use payroll software, don’t forget to update your employee’s NI number there too.

Need help?

You can get in touch if you need help.

Please get in touch and we’ll guide you through what you need to do next.

If you don’t match the fields in your data file to the ones we display on screen, we won’t be able to process your file. So it’s important you make sure your columns are matched correctly.

If we can, we’ll automatically match your fields for you. But if not, you’ll see a drop-down box to select the column in your data file that includes the information we’re looking for.

Once you’ve matched your non-optional fields, you’ll be able to click continue at the bottom of the page and carry on with submitting your data. Once you’ve done this initially, unless the format of your data changes, you won’t need to do this again.

Do I need column headers on my file?

No. However, we strongly advise that there are column headings on the file to help you match the columns.

“Employee is aged 75 or over and has contributions on the file”

This will happen if you’ve submitted contributions for an employee that is now 75 or over. To stop the file error, you’ll need to remove the member who is over 75 from the file. You’ll need to get in touch with us to request a form to complete the first pay period this affects. You can then submit the same form each time contributions are needed, simply update the pay period and amounts as required. The form can then be sent to Support@peoplespartnership.co.uk