Proactive is not authorised to give pensions advice, and the comments here are a guide to complying with new legislation. It is not a guide to pensions! The figures below relate the tax year 2016/17 and may change every April as each new tax year starts.
Do I need to comply?
You may not need to offer auto enrolment if your business employs no regular staff, but only directors, and none of those directors have a contract of employment. If that’s the case then check this report.
For everybody else, the key points …

Late on Thursday 23 Jun 2016, we tried to submit a number of Coporation Tax returns for clients. The data went in (apparently), but the normal response did not come back. We tried again early on Friday with the same blank result.

According to Acorah, our software supplier, this issue (experienced by many accountants) was raised with HMRC on Friday, and whilst the data has arrived on the HMRC systems, it is only the “result” message which is failing. We checked the HMRC status page on both Thursday and Friday and …

“I need to issue a Credit Note. What should I do?”
A credit note is simply a negative invoice. It replicates the original invoice is almost every way except that the amounts and the figures are shown as negatives. The date on the Credit Note is normally the date you prepared it, unless there are compelling reasons to use a different date.
Use whatever the next number is (in your normal invoice number sequence) for the credit note. If your software forces you to use a different number sequence for credit notes, …

We are accountants and tax advisers, and we do not get involved in pension matters. However, this is what we know about the interaction between National Insurance Contributions and the UK State Pension.

If you are following our recommended director shareholder payments pattern, then your salary should be high enough to give you a National Insurance credit, even though you don’t pay Class 1 National Insurance.
A full year at this level is a “qualifying year”. This page https://www.gov.uk/state-pension/eligibility used to say:
“You might not pay National Insurance Contributions because you’re earning less …

In the good old days there was an easy way to work out the optimum pattern of salary and dividends for directors of small UK companies. With the advent of the Finance Bill 2016 the situation has become hopelessly complex and that prompted AccountingWeb to publish a critical blogpost. Here’s the first bit with the all important table:

If you want to see the blogpost in full you’ll have to sign up for membership of AccountingWeb. It’s a free resouce for accountants!
And, as we said in our 30 Nov 2015 blogpost, …