Avon Pension Fund has implemented a new software system to gather member information from employers in order to reduce the risk of errors, as it moves to fully electronic reporting.
More schemes are upgrading the software they use in line with auto-enrolment and new guidelines issued by the Pensions Regulator to improve the accuracy of member data.
The £3.1bn fund began rolling out the payroll software package in March and April of this year.
[It] has enabled us to obtain all the data from payroll extracts and upload [them] without human interference
“[The package] has enabled us to obtain all the data from payroll extracts and upload [them] to the pension system without human interference,” said Geoff Cleak, pension benefits manager at the fund.
The data error risk has been reduced and consistent information is uploaded to the administration system on a monthly basis, Cleak said.
Though it is expected to help with auto-enrolment from an employer’s point of view, the implementation is part of a planned move towards 100 per cent electronic data submission by employers by April 2014.
The system is used by larger employers with 5,000 or more members, with Bristol City Council being the largest employer using it.
More and more large companies are implementing flexible benefit systems to collect member data, according to Roger Higgins, partner at consultancy KPMG.
Many larger employers have systems that are reasonably outdated and therefore have required different older arrangements, such as payroll and their SAP system, to be connected, he said.
Auto-enrolment has been the catalyst for many employers upgrading the systems they use to collate member data, Higgins said.
“If you didn’t have a staging date coming up you might put it off a bit longer,” he added.
Legislative requirements as well as needing to keep up with the industry as a whole were equal drivers for schemes updating their systems, said Paul Latimer, partner at consultancy Barnett Waddingham.
“There are systems for auto-enrolment, but you would still want to integrate that with your [existing] system,” he said.
Latimer said schemes were more frequently questioning how much investment has been made into the data gathering systems they use.
The best arrangements will have a single point of data entry, which includes information from HR, pensions and other flexible benefits, said Higgins.
“Ideally you would have a system where you only enter data once and verify it right at the start,” he said.
This type of system will help keep all member data up to date as changes will only need to be entered once.
