The Cushon Auto Enrolment Portal automatically uses a 3-month postponement (and 3-year re-enrolment) period. You should not expect to provide contributions on your initial file.
However, you should be prepared that any employee may choose to opt in/join the pension scheme shortly after you have submitted your first payroll file to our system. It is during the pay period following an employee’s pension scheme joining date that contributions will be expected, and deductions should start.
- Our system is designed to not interfere with your payroll - you close and run your payroll as per usual, produce a report to load into our system, and once your upload is complete, we’ll provide you with a ‘Payroll Changes Report’ which contains clear instructions to implement before you close your next payroll.
- You can download the latest changes report from your portal by clicking on Payroll Changes Report in the Home screen
- A history of changes reports is available from the main portal screen under Previous Upload Reports.
The payroll system will use this information to calculate the pension contributions that need to be deducted from employees’ wages and those that the employer has to pay when employees are enrolled into the pension scheme.
Setting up the company pension scheme
If there is a pension scheme already set up in payroll for some or all employees, please contact us before proceeding any further.
Adding employees to the pension scheme
Once you have set up the pension scheme (at a company level) and when employees need to be enrolled into the pension scheme, you will need to adjust the employee payroll record within the payroll system. This enables contributions to be deducted from their salaries when they have to be enrolled.
Typically, this will be done through the pension or deduction section of the payroll system in the individual’s record.
We will tell you when you need to enrol employees into the pension scheme. please do not start deducting contributions for any employees until you are notified to do so by ourselves.
Before the commencement of the Duties date, we would recommend you run test examples for a small sample of employees to ensure the payroll is calculating and deducting the correct pension amounts from the employee’s wages.
Note: We'll tell you when you need to enrol employees into the pension scheme. please do not start deducting contributions for any employees until you are notified to do so by ourselves. Before the commencement of the Duties date, we would recommend you run test examples for a small sample of employees to ensure the payroll is calculating and deducting the correct pension amounts from the employee’s wages.
Providing payroll data
We need certain employee information every time you process the payroll. This enables us to assess employees, communicate with them and confirm to you when employees need to be enrolled into the pension scheme.
Note: we need employee data for all current employees every time the payroll is run, not just for the employees who are enrolled into the pension scheme.
Template data file
Note: It is important that you provide a unique company-issued or personal email address for each employee included on your Data File. Cushon Master Trust communicates important information directly to members, so you don’t have to. Without this information, employees will not be able to access their account online or receive important updates about their workplace pension. If Cushon MasterTrust is unable to communicate statutory information directly to employees on this payroll file because of missing email addresses, it will be your responsibility to complete this activity.
Uploading the payroll data
- All headings (such as row 1 in the example above) MUST be removed from the CSV file that you upload.
- Before the report is loaded into our system, it must be converted to a CSV file. Importantly, you must ensure that any numeric fields are set to zero if they have no value and are not left blank, and that Address lines 1 and 2 have been populated (Address lines 3 and 4 can be blank). An example of what a file should look like before you upload it is shown below.