The introduction of automatic enrolment means that employers across the UK must enrol eligible jobholders into a workplace pension scheme.

Employers must choose a pension scheme that meets the qualifying criteria for auto enrolment. The Pensions Regulator recommends that you choose your pension provider 6 months before your staging date to allow enough time to make the right choice for you and your staff.

There are a number of things to consider when choosing a pension provider, one of the most important being compatibility with your payroll software. Each pension provider requires information in various formats and so it is essential that your payroll software supports your chosen pension provider.

Speak to your payroll provider and ask them if your chosen pension scheme will work with your software. If it doesn’t, you should consider updating your software.

BrightPay currently supports 14 different pension providers, with more constantly being added. If your chosen pension provider is not on the list below, feel free to let us know and we can look into making it available.

The pension provider support in BrightPay allows you to create customised enrolment and contribution files for each of the pension providers, where applicable. APIs with a number of the above pension providers are also in working progress. This means that there will be a direct link between BrightPay and the pension scheme provider.

Although BrightPay supports these pension providers, the software does not choose the pension scheme provider for you. It is the employer’s responsibility to choose a relevant pension provider for their workforce.
To assist with choosing a pension scheme, The Pensions Regulator has recently released a guide to selecting a pension scheme for automatic enrolment for employers. If you need extra guidance, you can also contact an Independent Financial Adviser, but ultimately, the choice of scheme is the responsibility of the employer.

Written by Rachel Hynes for BrightPay Payroll and Auto Enrolment Software