employmentPeriod

The employmentPeriod.start date must be provided for every employee contribution in every contributions request, and is used to detect new joiners within the scheme.

We match the employees in the contributions request with existing employees from previous requests based on:

• Date of birth
• Surname
• Unique identifier

If one of the above pieces of information has changed since the previous contributions request, we will match this with the existing record.

If more than one of the above pieces of information has changed since the previous contributions request, we will not match this to the existing record automatically and will assume the employee is a new starter. If your system recognises that more than one of these pieces of information has changed between payroll runs you should bring this to the user’s attention to avoid creating new starters unnecessarily.

We will pick up any new starter based on the employment start date provided.

The employmentPeriod.end date is optional. Its presence indicates that the employee has left the scheme.

If contributions are due for an employee who has left the scheme, an employmentPeriod.end date should be provided along with any outstanding contributions due to the employee.

After a leave date has been supplied, the employee can be removed from future submissions. If the employee must be included on future submissions the employmentPeriod.end date should remain.

Where an employee is missing from a subsequent submission we’ll assume they’ve left the scheme. The period of employment will be closed as at the end of the last PRP if no employment end date is supplied.

Where an employee has an end date for employment, contributions will be accepted if it is within 2 PRPs of the end date.