Hotel and travel companies must ‘act fast’ on auto-enrolment

Small hotels and hospitality businesses have been urged to “act fast” to untangle payroll data in order to meet upcoming pension auto-enrolment data deadlines. Financial advice firm Lighthouse Group has warned that many of the country’s 1.8 million small to medium sized businesses (SMEs), which are approaching their pensions auto-enrolment staging dates, are in danger of missing deadlines by underestimating the amount of data needed to complete the process. It warned that tens of thousands of hotel and travel SMEs are now starting to grapple with the “complexities” of employer pension schemes for the first time. The warning comes after the Pension Regulator recently stated that only 29% of those staging in 2016 were fully aware of their date and only 46% of those staging in 2017 were aware of their responsibilities. Roger Sanders, managing director of Lighthouse Group, has urged business owners to familiarise themselves with the requirements and assess their business as soon as possible, even if their staging date is two years away. He said: “Employers’ auto-enrolment duties go far beyond setting up a pension scheme and enrolling staff in it. They must assess their workforce, work out who to enrol and decide how much they and their employees will contribute. “They also need to keep records of all this information, together with any changes, all of which represents a significant amount of work for smaller employers.” He also said many businesses in hospitality and travel lack the accurate, up-to-date information on employees needed to complete enrolment smoothly. Firms that leave their enrolment preparation too late may come into difficulty when they discover “years of payroll and employee data needs to be sorted before they can properly begin”. Lighthouse has advised that employers who use a payroll bureau should ask whether their systems and software are geared up to deal with auto-enrolment, assessing if they can extract needed information easily, in a suitable format, and on a regular basis. A payroll bureau generally holds information such as an employee’s full name, their salary or wages and National Insurance number, but may not have the employee’s address and other contact details such as email, which is often held by the employer. However, under auto-enrolment all this information needs to be brought together each time an employee is paid, whether monthly, fortnightly or weekly.