Childcare Vouchers - How to complete the Basic Earnings Assessment task in Bulk (for UK only)

Introduction

Clients need to perform a Basic Earnings Assessment for all CCV users who have joined the scheme after 06/04/2011. Even though clients perform these checks away from our platform, we still need to update the details we have in order to run a smooth process. Because of this, SmartPay™ clients will need to complete their BEA task on the SmartPay™ dashboard between 1st March- 1st June.

This process used to be done manually per employee. While this worked great for smaller clients, bigger clients would need to spend a substantial amount of time assessing all their employees. To help with this, the task can now be completed through an upload functionality similar to the bulk approval in SmartPay™.

Instead of choosing "Basic", "Higher" or "Additional" for each employee from a dropdown list, clients can now download a spreadsheet of the employees that need to be assessed and fill in the necessary information. Once ready, they can just upload it back on the same interface. 

Note: The Salary thresholds for the different tax brackets are subject to change and can be checked here. 

Once assigned, the limit will be fixed until the start of the next tax year (usually between 1st March and 1st June the following year) when a new Basic Earning Assessment will be due to be assigned. 

Who can use this process?

The manual assessment process is enabled for all CCV clients on post-approval.

Clients on Auto-approval use the Auto-BEA process by default but can turn on the manual process instead in SmartPay. This can easily be done from Products/ Childcare/ Advanced settings, just under the payment options: 

Once this has been enabled, clients can either assess their employees one by one or complete them in bulk by following the steps below.

Step by step guide

1. Click on the Basic Earnings Assessment task in SmartPay. If the task is not there, go to the SPChildcare tab in Reward Manager and click on the Earnings Assessment tab.

2. You should be able to see the list of payrolls on your programme.

3. Click "View" on the payroll you would like to assess. This will lead you to the payroll assessment page: 

4. Click "Export Assessments". This should download a PENDING_ASSESSMENTS file that contains 4 columns: 

• Payroll number - populated with the employee number 
• Name - populated with the employee’s First and Last Name
• Current Tax Rate -populated with the current Earnings cap - can be either Basic, Higher or Additional 
• New Tax Rate - empty

5. You will need to open the document and fill the New Tax rate for each employee. When done, save the file as .csv and go back to the assessment interface and click "Process basic earnings assessments via file upload". This will bring you to the File Upload interface: 

6. Click "Select file from your computer" and upload the file. This will bring you to the match columns step.

7. Even though you are uploading 4 columns, only 2 of them are relevant for the upload. The Name and Current Tax Rate columns are there to make differentiating employees and processing easier.

8. Make sure the columns are mapped correctly and click “Next” to proceed to the review changes step.

9. The Impact Assessment will tell you how many assessments are about to be processed and will highlight any errors you might encounter. Click "Next" to complete the upload:

10. The next page will confirm that the file was processed correctly and the applications have been assessed. In the unlikely event that, after completing the upload, you still have applications that need to be assessed, you will be informed that there are still some pending applications and will be brought back to the Earnings Assessment page to process them manually. 

11. Finally, if you go back to the Earnings Assessments page, you’ll be able to see that the assessment for the payroll you just processed is now Completed. 

12. Clicking "View" will display the confirmed assessments with the new Earnings Cap for each employee.