As part of your auto enrolment duties, you have a legal obligation as an employer to put all eligible employees into your workplace pension scheme.
Why you might postpone
In certain circumstances, you can delay your duties – also known as postponement. This will defer the date the employee is enrolled in the pension scheme.
When you can postpone
You may want to choose postponement if you have temporary or seasonal employees who you know will stop working for you within three months, or that have occasional spikes in their pay that would make them eligible. Scenarios where you can postpone:
- From the duties start date.
- An employee’s start date.
- Date employee first becomes eligible.
- You can then postpone employees from enrolling into the pension scheme for up to 3 months.
- Once you have hit the 3 months you must enrol your employee if they are an eligible job holder, you cannot apply another period of postponement.
How to use postponement rules in QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll
- In your QuickBooks, go to Payroll settings > Pension settings > Contribution plan.
- Tick the checkbox to select the postponement rules that apply:
- When the employer reaches their duties start date.
- When an employee joins a company.
- When an employee reaches the age of 22.
- When an employee becomes eligible after initial assessment (this rule will only be run after an employee has already been assessed in a prior pay run)
- Select Save.
Set a postponement date for each employee
If none of the rules against the pensions scheme are what you’re looking for, you can set a postponement date against your individual employee. To do so:
- In the Employee Details, select Pensions Settings.
- Choose Postpone until the following date.
- Enter the deferral date. This is the last day of the postponement period.
- Save.
Note: You can have a mixture of employees with individual deferral dates and employees using scheme postponement rules.
Once you have saved the scheme you’ll then be able to assign that pension to an employee in the employees pension settings.
Add multiple contribution plans
You can add multiple Contribution Plans by clicking on the Add button after saving your first plan and filling in the details.
When you create a pay run, your employees will be assessed and postponement will be applied to any employees that meet the postponement rule requirements. Once you have finalised the pay run postponement letters will be created which you can then send to the employees.
When the deferral date comes around, employees will be assessed in the pay run and if required enrolled into the pension scheme.