Setting up a Penfold Pension in BrightPay

Select the relevant company in BrightPay, and go to Pensions.

Click the Add Scheme button and select Penfold from the range of options.

Registration Details

👉 Tip: you will need the 'Account Number' a unique code assigned by Penfold to the employer. Typically, it starts with PEN followed by your Company Number, and is also known as EmployerID. You can find it on the dashboard 👇

Note: BrightPay only allows the following format PENnnnnnnnn, which doesn’t cover all possible EmployerIDs. Please let us know if you are struggling to input a valid EmployerID and we will report this to BrightPay for you

Groups

BrightPay requires you to set up at least one “Group” for your Penfold Pension. This is to enable you to set the contribution rates for the scheme. You can have more than one Group, as required. For example if you have Salary Sacrifice and non-Salary Sacrifice contributions based on statutory minimum contributions, you would set this up as 2 Groups as follows:

Field	Example 1	Example 2
Group name: Use any name that helps you recognise the group. It doesn’t have to match anything.	Salary Sacrifice	Non Salary Sacrifice
Contribution type: Minimum, Custom or Fixed	Use Custom Contribution rates	Use Minimum Contribution rates
Contribution rates: In a Salary Sacrifice arrangement, all contributions are Employer contributions	Employer 8% Employee 0%	Employer 3% Employee 5%
Earnings basis: Standard or Custom	Standard Qualifying Earnings	Standard Qualifying Earnings
Earnings band lower limit: If custom, you can edit or remove these	£6,240	£6,240
Earnings band upper limit: If custom, you can edit or remove these	£50,270	£50,270

Once you have entered all the required settings, press Save.

How do I set BrightPay up to produce the right data?

Great news - BrightPay is set up to automatically produce data that can be dragged and dropped straight into your Penfold Platform. Follow these simple steps to easily manage your Penfold data flow:

To enrol employees

Go to each employee and click Automatic Enrolment: here you will be presented with a range of options - this may include postponing, opting out or exempting the employee (refer to BrightPay for further guidance around these options).

To enrol someone for the first time, click Enrol, confirm the Enrolment Date and select the appropriate scheme/group to enrol the employee into.

If the employee is already enrolled in another scheme, the Automatic Enrolment section will include an option to Switch to a different scheme.

In either case, you’ll be prompted to:

Confirm the Enrolment Date and select the appropriate scheme/group to enrol the employee into.
Create and send an enrolment letter to the employee.

Note on enrolment summaries

Once enrolled, employees will appear in the contributions file. You do not need a separate enrolment summary to enrol them, so don’t worry if BrightPay doesn’t produce one.

If you want to enrol employees before you process the contributions (e.g. so they get their opt out instructions before you run payroll), you can upload the contributions file to the “Add Employees Only” window on the Penfold Platform. Otherwise, they will be enrolled when you upload the contributions.

To process the contributions summary

Follow these simple steps:

Go to Payroll and Finalise your Payslips as normal
If there are contributions due, you’ll see that a notification appears in the Pensions menu - click on this.
Within the Pensions section, you’ll see a notification on the Contributions Summary. Click this, and follow the steps on-screen to generate a CSV file.
Save the file to a secure location, and hey presto it’s ready to drag and drop into the Penfold Platform

👉 Tip on Salary Sacrifice - when generating the CSV file, BrightPay will ask you to confirm whether Salary Sacrifice applies to the contributions however the actual contributions are based on the rates set up in payroll, so it’s important to ensure you have enrolled the employee into a Salary Sacrifice group where the contributions are all Employer contributions.

For employees switching from another scheme, we are aware that in some cases employees switched from another scheme will have “ExitDates” included in their contribution summaries. Don’t worry about this - Penfold knows to ignore the ExitDates in this scenario, so it will not affect your contributions process.