What happens once I’ve transferred the enrolment file to Nest?

Once you’ve sent the file to us using your Nest file gateway we’ll check if the file is in the correct format and structure. We’ll check for the following details in the file:

• if it has a header, detail and trailer sections
• if the mandatory data fields are completed
• other information in the file - if you’ve included the employer reference number, number of member records
• perform member-level checks - if you’ve supplied a valid National Insurance number or alternative unique identifier and any inconsistencies between fields like payment source, group name, title and gender

Workers will be enrolled if their records pass these checks. The checks take place in batches with the following timescales.

Files are processed in batches between 8am and 6pm, seven days a week. If a file with up to 999 workers is uploaded after 6pm, processing may not be complete until 10am the following morning.

If you’ve chosen ‘Collect daily notifications of enrolments’ through your online Nest account, you can collect a successful or unsuccessful enrolment file using the Nest file gateway. You’ll also receive messages in your secure Nest mailbox.

You’ll need to log into your Nest account using your SFTP client to collect these files. The files will be in either XML or CSV format, depending on the preference you specified when you selected to receive return files.

A successful enrolment file contains details of all the workers you’ve enrolled during the previous day and method used to enrol them. It also contains the start and end dates of the workers’ opt-out period.

We’ll send you an unsuccessful enrolment file to let you know about any workers that weren’t enrolled successfully the day before. We’ll send you a separate file for each enrolment file you upload using SFTP in one day to make it easier for you to manage. We won’t include details of workers who’ve been enrolled through our website. We’ll also send an enrolment error log file to detail the errors for each worker that wasn’t successfully enrolled.