Clear Books auto enrolment features - Stage 1

Last month, we set out our auto enrolment plan to let Clear Books customers know what we’re doing to ensure our Payroll application complies with the upcoming changes to workplace pensions.

Today, we’re releasing ‘Stage 1’ of our auto enrolment plan, the first of 4 stages we aim to complete and release by the end of January.

Which auto enrolment features are now available as part of the ‘Stage 1’ release?

New Payroll navigation structure, including new pensions tab

We have moved a few things around in the navigation of Clear Books Payroll, to improve the user experience and general clarity.

• The Home tab is now called Payroll
• The RTI page has been moved from the Employer tab to the Payroll tab
• The P60 tool has been moved from the Employer tab to the Employee tab
• There is now a brand new Pensions tab which includes a pension scheme setup page

Temporary removal of 'Assess workforce' report

We will be launching our new 'Assess the workforce' report on 13th January as part of 'Stage 2' of our auto enrolment release. In the mean time, if you want to work out who to put into a pension scheme, you can use this tool on The Pensions Regulator website.

Ability to add a pension scheme suitable for auto enrolment

Clear Books Payroll users can now add a pension scheme for auto enrolment by navigating to Pensions > Pension Scheme and clicking the Add new pension scheme link. Currently only one scheme is supported but we will enable multiple schemes in a future iteration of our system - we are aiming for a February release for this.

Take a look at our new support guide for more detailed instructions on how to add a pension scheme

New pension contributions functionality

• When adding a pension scheme by following the steps mentioned above , the option to support ‘Tax Relief at Source’ contributions has been added - users should input the percentage of the entire employee’s contribution and the system will account for tax relief when making deductions.
• Support for Net Pay Arrangement contributions has also been added to the same page.

You can also consult the support guide for adding a pension scheme to help you with this.

Ability to set auto enrolment and pension details for all employees

• We have added some new fields to the ‘Employees details’ page so that users can begin to fill in information for their employees’ automatic enrolment.

We’ll be communicating the details of each of our auto enrolment releases, so keep an eye on our blog and Community forum over the next few weeks. Stage 2 of our Auto Enrolment release is due on 13th January.