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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2024-09-20
Setup Considerations: Pensions Auto-Enrolment (UK)

Setup Considerations: Pensions Auto-Enrolment (UK)

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Pensions Auto-Enrolment. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Workday enables you to combine workers' pension eligibility assessments from Workday Payroll with a pension scheme in Workday Benefits. You can configure Workday to assess workers' eligibility and automatically enrol them into a company pension scheme.

Business Benefits

Workday automates the process of assessing and identifying eligible workers and enroling them into your pension scheme. This automation reduces manual effort and makes it easier to comply with UK laws on workers' pensions.
Assessing workers' eligibility in Payroll ensures that you use their latest earnings instead of historical data.

Use Cases

Workday enables you to manage a wide variety of pension enrolment scenarios, including:
  • Opt ins.
  • Opt outs.
  • Re-enrolments.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Do you want to postpone enrolment?
You can configure Workday to postpone enrolment as part of your company configurations.
Example: You could postpone aligning a worker's enrolment with their pay periods. The enrolment must be within 3 months of their assessment.
Do you manage pensions in an external source?
If you manage your pensions outside of Workday, you can use web services to mass load data from your pension provider.

Recommendations

To prevent possible calculation mismatches, Workday recommends that you use the same selection criteria when you create rules that:
  • Enrol workers into a retirement savings plan in Benefits.
  • Calculate pension contributions in Payroll.
To ensure that you use workers' latest pay details, create a scheduled passive event to enrol eligible workers, that automatically runs after your
Run Pay Complete
task finishes. Workday recommends that you set up 3 passive events, each with its own benefit eligibility rules, to identify:
  • New hires.
  • Rehired workers.
  • Workers who must, or want to, re-enrol in the pension.
Workday recommends that you use Workday Benefits to integrate with Workday Payroll. Payroll for the UK customers who aren't licensed to use Benefits can use limited benefits features to support the set up of UK pension auto-enrolment.

Requirements

Workday Payroll on its own isn't a pensions solution. Record your pension benefits details using either:
  • Benefits in Human Capital Management.
  • Externally provided data. Example: From your pension provider.
Load existing benefit elections and assessment history for all workers, including workers who have opted out of pensions auto-enrolment.

Limitations

  • You can only send auto-enrolment details to workers as a Workday notification or an email. You can't send notifications as a letter or added to a worker's documents.
    For workers without email, you can send their notification to an administrative email address, manually copy the content to a letter, and attach the letter to their documents.
  • Payroll for the UK doesn't support pension auto-enrolment in prior pay periods. If you run payroll in arrears, you can either turn off the pension auto-enrolment feature or ensure you monitor the process and make the necessary adjustments.

Tenant Setup

You can select tenant-wide configuration on the
Edit Tenant Setup - Notifications
task to determine how auto-enrolment notifications are sent to workers.

Security

Domains
Considerations
Process: Pensions Auto Enrolment Notifications - UK
in the UK Payroll functional area.
Enables you to create and send notifications to workers.
Set Up: Benefits
domain in the Benefits functional area.
Enables you to:
  • Set up a benefits plan for workers who Workday assesses as eligible for auto-enrolment.
  • Set up a passive event to enrol workers into a benefits plan.
Set Up: Payroll (Pensions) - UK
in the UK Payroll functional area.
Enables you to create and manage pension schemes and re-enrolment dates to use with auto-enrolment.
Set Up: Payroll UK
in the UK Payroll functional area.
Enables you to set up and modify employer reference details, including email configuration for auto-enrolment notifications.
Set Up: System
domain in the System functional area.
Enables you to configure the different email templates to use for enrolment notifications.
Set Up: Tenant Setup - BP and Notifications
domain in the System functional area.
Enables you to configure Workday for UK enrolment notifications.
Worker Data: Payroll (Company Specific) - UK
domain in the UK Payroll functional area.
Enables you to record enrolment and re-enrolment data for a single worker. Example: Opting in or out.

Business Processes

Workday recommends that you add a To Do reminder to the
Pay Cycle Event
business process, after the
Run Pay Complete
task, to identify and enrol eligible workers into your workplace pension scheme.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
View Company UK Pensions Auto Enrolment Details
Use this report to review a company's:
  • Key auto-enrolment dates.
  • Qualifying pension schemes.
View UK Pensions Re-Enrolment Details
Enables you to review which workers were re-enrolled into a qualifying pension scheme.
View Worker UK Pensions Auto Enrolment Details
Enables you to review the assessment history for a single worker.
In addition to the provided reports, consider creating custom reports to provide further analysis, such as:
  • Assessment history within a pay group.
  • A worker's notification history.
  • The workers scheduled to be re-enrolled at the mandatory 3 year re-enrolment.

Integrations

Web Service
Considerations
Get Pensions Auto Enrolment Legacy Assessment History Only
Put Pensions Auto Enrolment Legacy Assessment History Only
Loads and retrieves any external assessment history from your legacy system.
Get Worker Pensions Auto Enrolment Details
Put Worker Pensions Auto Enrolment Details
Loads and retrieves workers' auto-enrolment details.
Get Change Benefits
Loads workers' benefit elections and retirement savings plans.

Connections and Touchpoints

Features
Considerations
Benefits
Use Benefits to record details for use with pension calculations in Payroll:
  • Passive events to enrol workers.
  • Retirement savings benefit plans.
Run categories
Configure your run category to calculate the pensions auto-enrolment assessment pay component, in both on-cycle and off-cycle runs, for both:
  • Active workers.
  • Workers on leave.
Retro
Workday considers workers' pensions auto-enrolment assessments in retro processing when changes occur in Benefits. Workday provides calculations that you use with pension contributions data to ensure accurate retro processing results.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.