What are the required actions and why are these blocking the payroll?
How to solve a required action
The employee is not in a pension scheme but is eligible.
Some information is missing from the employee section.
The most common required actions encountered
What are the required actions and why are these blocking the payroll?
Required actions are warnings in the app that appears when some information is missing or actions need to be taken. All these are ensuring that your payroll is compliant with the HMRC legislation.
The required actions are blocking you from running payroll and these need to be solved regardless of the way your payroll runs (automatically or manually).
How to solve a required action
It's an easy and short process that you have to follow in order to solve the required actions encountered.
The app will display these on the top of the page, next to your company name.
Click on the bell and a small window will show you a message with the details of the required actions.
In order to solve these, click on each of these messages and you will automatically be redirected to the respective page.
In this case, we have 2 required actions:
1️⃣ The employee is not in a pension scheme but is eligible.
As soon as you click on the message and you are redirected to the respective page, you will see that you have 2 main options to choose from based on the employee's case:
If the employee opted out from the pension scheme in a previous period, activate the toggle 'Employee opted out before PayFit' and add the Opt-out date, then Save details.
Include the employee in one of your company's pension scheme by activating the toggle to 'Include in', add the contribution details and Save details.
Once the required action is solved, this will disappear from the top of the page.
2️⃣ Some information is missing from the employee section.
As soon as you click on the message and you are redirected to the respective page, you will see that you have to add the employee missing information, then Save the action.
The most common required actions encountered
Some required actions are more common than others and we've made a list with those the most commonly encountered:
An employee is missing some information (tax code, NI letter, payment method)
An employee is eligible for automatic enrolment, yet not included in a qualifying pension scheme
An employee salary is under the National Minimum Wage
An employee’s salary is negative (for various reasons mentioned in the message)
See this article for more guidance on how to view and add/edit employee information.
You will also see some required actions for actions to take at the company level such as:
Some steps in the onboarding process have not been completed
No NIC calculation method has been selected for company directors
This month’s expenses need to be validated
The employer must re-apply for Employment Allowance Employment Allowance and Small Employers' Relief
Some employees share the same payroll IDs when these need to be unique to each employee
The payment method is BACS
No matter what required actions you will see in your account, the process is the same. Click on the bell to see the details of this, click on the message to be redirected to the respective page, add the missing details and Save the action.