A wealth-management business is warning that many of the UK’s 1.8 million small employers are in danger of missing their deadlines for pension auto-enrolment by “under-estimating” the amount of data needed to complete the process.

The Lighthouse Group’s Roger Sanders says that “tens of thousands of manufacturing and engineering SMEs and micro-employers are now starting to grapple with the complexities of employer pension schemes for the first time”.

He added: “Employers’ auto-enrolment duties go far beyond setting up a pension scheme and enrolling staff in it. They must assess their workforce, work out who to enrol and decide how much they and their employees will contribute.

They also need to keep records of all this information, together with any changes, all of which represents a significant amount of work for smaller employers.

“However, we are finding that many manufacturing and engineering firms lack the accurate, up-to-date employee information that is vital to completing the enrolment process smoothly.

Firms that leave their enrolment preparation too late will be in for a shock when they discover that years of payroll and employee data needs to be sorted before they can properly begin.”

More information can be found at the Web site (www.lighthousegroup.plc.uk).