Why can't I enroll a specific employee on the company pension?

kitjohnson · ‎December 22, 2022

I've just setup a pension provider in Quickbooks.

In Paylroll > Employees, for employee 1 I can see "Worker category = Not assessed", and can toggle "Enrolled in pension", and below that, "Advanced".

For employee 2, all I see is "Not assessed" and "Advanced". There is no "Enrolled in pension" toggle. (See the screenshot.)

Why could this be? Other than the fact that one of these employees is the director and one isn't, I don't see any difference between the schedule, pay method, tax codes etc. of these two employees.

kitjohnson · ‎December 23, 2022

Thanks GeorgiaC very much for that solution. It does seem like a potentially troublesome workaround for some people - in this case employee 2 has only worked for 4 months, so it would be no problem. Imagine if you'd had a part-time employee for 10 years who now goes full-time and you have 10 years of rollbacks to do. It also doesn't explain pension enrollment is possible for employee 1 but not for employee 2.

In the end, I was able to solve this simply by running payroll for this month in which both employees first qualify for a pension. When I tried running payroll, employee 1 showed it would be their first month paying into Nest. Employee 2 showed the same thing but with a validation error. I couldn't proceed because Quickbooks told me I needed to resolve the validation error, although it gave me no way to do this. I went back to the dashboard and tried again, and this time the validation errors were magically gone, and both employees showed they would be paying Nest contributions. After submitting the payroll, now employee 2 is shown as enrolled on the pension.

View solution in original post

CharleneMaeF · ‎December 22, 2022

I know how important it is to enroll your employees on the company pension, kitjohnson

All eligible employees must be enrolled in the pension scheme in QuickBooks Online. To know their eligibility, I've listed them below:

Aged between 22 and the State Pension age
Earning at least £10,000 a year (or the equivalent prorated in a pay period)
Works in the UK (this also includes employees who are based in the UK but travel abroad for work)
Current earnings (also known as qualifying earnings), including commission, bonus, overtime pay, statutory sick pay, statutory maternity pay, statutory additional pay, or anything else that can be considered earnings

If they're eligible, the issue could be browser-related. The outdated stored cache can affect the performance of the program.

To rectify this, let's access your QuickBooks Online account via a private window. This is a good place to determine if there's an issue with the browser. Here are the keyboard shortcuts:

Safari: Command + Shift + N
Google Chrome: CTRL + Shift + N
Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Edge: CTRL + Shift + P

Once signed in, let's try to set up the person again. I'd suggest following these steps in these articles based on your subscription:

If it works, let's clear the browser's cache to ensure the program performs efficiently. Otherwise, you can use other supported browsers. They also provide the best and most secure experience with QuickBooks.

Additionally, I've added these resources that'll help you find a list of help articles and step-by-step instructions for specific features in Advanced and Standard Payroll:

Please keep us posted if you need additional assistance adding eligible employees to the company pension. We're always here to help you out.

kitjohnson · ‎December 22, 2022

Hi @CharleneMaeF , thanks very much for the quick response.

I can confirm that employee 2 is eligible for the pension scheme. I can also confirm that using a private window doesn't help.

I read the two web pages you linked to:

but they don't seem to address my problem. I have already set up pensions and have enrolled one employee. The question is, why can't I enroll employee 2.

GeorgiaC · ‎December 22, 2022

Hi kitjohnson, thanks for confirming their eligibility - has employee 2 already been included in a finalised or draft payroll run on QuickBooks?

kitjohnson · ‎December 22, 2022

Yes, employee 2 has already been paid for the past 4 months through QuickBooks. This month is the first month qualifying for pensions though.

GeorgiaC · ‎December 22, 2022

Thanks kitjohnson, in this case, you would need to rollback the payroll to the point that this employee was added to edit their pension settings to show as eligible. You can then run the payroll back through to date by changing the pension contributions % to zero until you reach the month that you want the deductions to apply from - then change the % amount in their settings to what this should be.

kitjohnson · ‎December 23, 2022

Thanks GeorgiaC very much for that solution. It does seem like a potentially troublesome workaround for some people - in this case employee 2 has only worked for 4 months, so it would be no problem. Imagine if you'd had a part-time employee for 10 years who now goes full-time and you have 10 years of rollbacks to do. It also doesn't explain pension enrollment is possible for employee 1 but not for employee 2.

In the end, I was able to solve this simply by running payroll for this month in which both employees first qualify for a pension. When I tried running payroll, employee 1 showed it would be their first month paying into Nest. Employee 2 showed the same thing but with a validation error. I couldn't proceed because Quickbooks told me I needed to resolve the validation error, although it gave me no way to do this. I went back to the dashboard and tried again, and this time the validation errors were magically gone, and both employees showed they would be paying Nest contributions. After submitting the payroll, now employee 2 is shown as enrolled on the pension.

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Why can't I enroll a specific employee on the company pension?