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As an existing Nest pension employer - we moved our payroll from an external supplier - in house to our existing Xero account. However, after repeated error messages - "Pension filling rejected by pension provider. Download and read the error report to learn about the problem." and 3 hours on the chat/phone/email with Nest saying ot was a Xero issue - I eventually got the response from Xero support below - it's a known error with the first submission! How have they either not fixed it - or at least offer help and guidance to everyone who all those who blindly come across this issue when they try and connect existing Nest pensions to Xero payroll.

The situation was made worse when we discovered in the process of trying to manually upload the data - that the Xero and Nest csv files are totally incompatible! I had to do it all manually - anyone with a larger team may have lost the plot!

Answer from support team -

If this is the first pension file generated in Xero, you'll need to manually upload the CSV pension file to NEST:

Process a pay run for your employees.
In the Payroll menu, select Pension filings. Xero might take a minute or so to list the details of the pay run if you’ve only just posted it. You might need to refresh your browser.
Click the menu icon .
Select Download CSV.
Login to your NEST account (NEST website) and process the file.
In Xero, select Mark as Filed from the menu icon.

The reason this needs to be manually uploaded is to ensure NEST connects the employee account correctly. Otherwise, the file will generally fail as NEST tries to enrol the employees, even though they have accounts, as is the case with the error message about the alternative identifier.

As the employee already has a record set up the pension provider will reject the file due to the duplicate information which is why you'll need to manually file this with the pension provider.

In regards to the error connected to your employee profile, if the your assessment details have been entered in the current period, your employee profile will be flagged as newly enrolled in the pension file and NEST will then create a record for this profile. If you're already listed as enrolled with NEST, the file will be rejected as they can't be enrolled again.

If this is the case, the pension file for the period will need to be manually uploaded to NEST. Going forward, the employee won't be listed as newly enrolled in the file and the filing should be successful.

After manually filing the April pension file, you shouldn't have any issues in your future pay runs. However, please let us know if you do continue to have errors, and we can investigate further!

Lets hope when we run our second payroll next week - we dont have the same problem.