When submitting your pension data in Sage Payroll to Smart Pensions, you sometimes receive the following error:

'Pay period is not consecutive. The pay period start date must be one day after the end of the previous pay period'.

Pay periods in Smart must align with the tax calendar as Sage Payroll automatically aligns to this.

This error means the dates in your Smart Pensions account don't align with the dates of the submission in Sage Payroll.

Amend dates then retry

To resolve this, you need to select the correct dates in your Smart Pensions account and align these dates to the Pay Reference Period.

Find your Pay Reference Period in Sage Payroll

1. Select the Summary Tab.
2. Under Auto Enrolment / Pensions, select View Submission Errors.
3. Make a note of the weekly or monthly Pay Reference Period dates.
4. Align the dates of your Group on Smart Pensions to the Pay Reference Period dates.
   
   TIP:

   If you need help with aligning your dates to tax periods, contact Smart for support.

5. Give the changes 24 hours to update in Smart systems and retry the submission.

Retry your submission

Once you’ve updated the Smart Pension, retry your submission.

1. Select Summary.
2. Select View Submission Details.
3. Select Submit Online.

Further information

Smart require you to submit the data for each pay period in order. 

For instance, this error will also occur if you try to submit month two before month one at the start of a new tax year.

You can check which periods you've already submitted contributions for in your Smart account. For help with this, contact Smart.