Skip to main content
English (Australia) English (Canada) English (Malaysia) English (New Zealand) English (Singapore)

Resolve common Smart Pension errors in PensionSync

Updated

This article lists common Smart Pension errors and how to fix them, starting with errors in the employer or employee contributions. The contribution plan should include the contribution percentages, and tax relief should be net pay.

Smart Pension Contributions

If you are getting an error with the employer contributions or employee contributions being incorrect (wording similar to the below), please review your pension settings through the Payroll Settings > Pension Settings menu.

The Contribution Plan should have the contribution percentages included and the tax relief should be net pay (all Smart Pension schemes are on a net pay basis, not Relief at Source). If no details are showing in the Contribution Plan, please click to import from PensionSync.

Example:

The contribution amount included in your submission for this worker is not consistent with their pensionable earnings and applicable contribution rate for the pay period.

 

Smart Pension External ID

Smart Pension require all workers on their portal to have a unique ID called: External ID.

If you get an error around a missing external ID or a duplicate NI Number/email address, you should review the workers on the Smart Pension portal to ensure the external ID is present and matches with the worker's employee ID/payroll ID in payroll. It's best to check through all the workers.

There is help available on the link below of how to review/amend on the Smart Pension portal.

http://support.autoenrolment.co.uk/en/articles/3696002-updating-employee-details

Examples of errors you may see:

Your submission cannot be processed because some of the worker records already present at the pension provider Smart Pension are missing a value for the 'external_id' field. Please log in to your Smart Pension portal account and add the missing 'external_id' values before issuing your submission again.

Or:

The NI number you have provided for this worker is already assigned to another worker at the pension provider Smart Pension. Please review and correct the NI number so that it is unique for all the workers in the company.

Or:

The email address you have provided for this worker is already assigned to another worker at the pension provider Smart Pension. Please review and correct the email address so that it is unique for all the workers in the company.

 Smart Pension period dates

If you get an error from your submission to the Smart Pension which is based on incorrect period dates, the first thing to check is to go to the Smart Pension portal and check that all workers are up to date with the same expected next period.

If there are one or more workers who are not as up to date as others, then please update these so that all workers are aligned. If you need help wit this, please contact Smart Pension.

If the period dates still don't match after this activity is completed, please contact support to assist in aligning the period dates.

Examples of errors that you might receive:

The period dates in your submission don't match what the pension provider Smart Pension is expecting for this worker. For this worker the expected period start date is 2019-04-01

Or:

Your submission does not match the pay period dates expected by the pension provider Smart Pension for the included worker(s). The expected pay period is as follows: Start Date 2019-04-01 to End Date 2019-04-30.