To comply with Workplace Pensions legislation, you must assess your employees every time you process a pay run. If you subscribe to the Pensions Module, the Pensions Assessment makes this easy for you. Let's learn more.

 NOTE: If you don't subscribe to the Pensions Module, you must assess your employees manually. Assess employees for automatic enrolment without the Pensions Module >

When to assess

You must run the Pension Assessment after you've set the process date and entered your employees' pay for a pay run, but before you update records.

This way, your software uses the correct payments in the assessment. This ensures that the Pensions Assessment assigns the correct Worker categories.

How to assess

With the Pensions Module, you can assess all of your employees in a few easy clicks. Let's run through the steps now.

 NOTE: If you see an ODBC error during the steps below, follow our ODBC Microsoft Access Driver Login Failed guide.  

1. On your employee list, select the employees you'd like to assess.
   TIP: To select all employees listed, click Clear, then click Swap.
2. Click Payroll, then click Pension Assessment.
   NOTE: A message may appear asking if you'd like to deselect employees who you can't assess, for example leavers. Click Yes to deselect these employees and continue.
3. A prompt appears asking if you'd like to take a backup. Click Yes to take a backup.
4. If you already have an up to date backup, click No to continue.
5. The Pension Assessment appears with a list of your employees with their worker type for this period under the Type column.

If any employees have become eligible for automatic enrolment in the period you've assessed, the Pension Assessment automatically assigns their pension scheme.

If you have any opt-in or opt-out requests, you can process these now. For help with processing these requests, visit our guides below:

• How do I process opt in/join requests in the Pensions Module? >
• How do I process opt out/leave requests in the Pensions Module? >

Worker types

Each employee you assess falls into one of three worker types based on their payments, UK worker status and age. These are Eligible Jobholder, Non-Eligible Jobholder and Entitled Worker.

If you'd like to know more about the different types of Worker and the criteria for each one, visit The Pensions Regulator guide. 

How do I check which employees' status has changed?

When an employee's worker type changes or the assessment enrols them, a flag icon appears to the left of their name in the Pension Assessment.

You can also filter the list of employees in the assessment to show those whose status has changed this period. To do this, click the View dropdown box, and select Changed this period. 

If you hover your cursor over the flag, you can then see more information about what has changed. Click the options below to see examples of these.

You can now close the Pension Assessment and continue to process your payroll.