Identify the error
A SMART pension failure email is divided into sections for each team member, starting with a status code: 201 (success), 404 (failure), or 422 (failure).
Note: Multiple team members can fail in a single submission.
The failure email contains complex code, but you can translate it to a readable format by copying the text after the { symbol and then pasting it into a JSON formatter (or a desktop application such as Notepad++).
Status 404
This means the team member cannot be found based on the information provided, or we haven’t got their Smart unique ID. This could be because:
They haven’t been enrolled in Smart
They have been enrolled in Smart with details that differ to what is in Paycircle
SMART do not send us any specific data that we can use to highlight which employee record(s) may be failing when this error triggers because there is no employee to match the data to. You can use the JSON file in combination with the Paycircle pension report to identify potential record(s) causing the failure.
Log in to Paycircle.
Open the payroll company the submission failure is relevant to.
Click Reporting.
Open the Paycircle Pension Report.
Change the period filter to match the period in the JSON file.
Within the report, you must now check the employees and ensure that anyone who is marked as:
enrolled
joined
opted in
and is also showing in SMART once the pension contributions have been uploaded (even if those contributions are NIL). When checking the data, it's important to ensure that the Name, Surname and NI Number values all match across both Paycircle and SMART.
Status 422
This status comes with an error code. The most common error code is 314, which means that the period being submitted is non-consecutive. This could be because:
SMART is expecting a different period than what is being submitted
Pay period dates have changed and haven’t been updated in Smart
A team member has been moved from one payroll to another, that share a pension scheme
There are outstanding contributions to be made
Contributions were uploaded manually outside of Paycircle, which conflicts with what is being submitted now