Kota Update August 2026: Salary Sacrifice, Renewal Experience, Billing Updates

This month brings three updates that take manual, repetitive work off your team: salary sacrifice run from one place, health renewals built directly into the product for Ireland, and billing that runs off your real payroll figures. Together they mean fewer spreadsheets, less compliance risk, and less back-and-forth for your HR and finance teams.

Watch Luke talk you through the updates here, or continue reading below:

1. Salary Sacrifice: every scheme, run from one place

Offering salary sacrifice used to mean a separate provider, a separate portal, and a separate spreadsheet for every scheme. Cycle-to-work in one place, EV in another, nursery somewhere else - all managed by hand. Now you can run them all from Kota.

Several providers, managed directly

EV, cycle-to-work, nursery and more now sit side by side in a single system, managed directly by us. Because Kota holds the provider relationships, you're not chasing five vendors or standing up a new scheme one at a time. Kota is the broker as well as the platform, and the broking is included - so adding a scheme your people ask for doesn't mean onboarding another supplier yourself.

Compliance checked across every sacrifice

The hard part of running several sacrifices for the same employee isn't sourcing them - it's staying compliant. Every sacrifice reduces gross pay, and they stack. Combined deductions can quietly push a lower earner below the National Minimum Wage, and getting benefit-in-kind wrong across stacked benefits can surface as a tax problem months later.

Kota now checks each employee's combined sacrifices automatically. It shows how much headroom a person has, and warns you before an additional deduction would take them below minimum wage - so finance can approve schemes without the risk hanging over them, and no one slips under the threshold by accident.

More choice, including for smaller teams

Because schemes are easy to offer and safe to stack, employees get more options, take-up goes up, and the tax savings grow for both the company and its people. It also opens doors that were previously closed: through our provider partnerships, smaller companies can access schemes like EV that they'd be turned away from going direct.

The result is one place for the employee, one consolidated deduction report for finance, and one compliance check across everything.

2. Health Renewals: renew health cover in-app

Renewing your team's health cover used to mean falling back on manual work. Health renewals are now built into Kota for Irish Life policies, so you can run the whole process in the platform and direct employees to make their choices through the Kota app.

A guided renewal window

When a renewal is coming up, you're notified ahead of the date and can decide whether to adjust your contributions, then open a renewal window for your team. It's a guided flow that builds on the setup experience you already know, adapted to make clear it's a renewal rather than a fresh sign-up.

Employees compare, choose, and manage dependants

Once the window opens, employees get their own guided experience. They can review their options, compare plans against the one they're already on, and either keep their current plan or switch to a new one. They can also add and manage dependants directly in the app - something that previously had to go through the provider.

The real-world edges handled

Renewals are never perfectly tidy, so we've built for the exceptions: late joiners who arrive after the window has opened can still enrol and slot into the renewal, and the grace period after the renewal date gives employees time to change plan, adjust dependants, or opt out. This first version focuses on Irish Life health, where the majority of renewal need sits today.

3. Payroll-Driven Billing: bill on real payroll figures

Billing has been based on salary estimates, which meant reconciling the difference by hand whenever real pay varied - variable pay one month, a contribution change the next. For a number of accounts we've been doing that manually, and it doesn't scale. Now you can bill on the numbers that actually ran through payroll.

Upload your payroll output

Employees make their pension changes in the app, you run payroll as usual, then upload your payroll output to Kota using a template you download straight from the product. Kota formats it for provider requirements, generates the pension report, and charges on the real figures rather than an estimate.

Validation before anything is charged

On upload, a preview screen matches your employees and surfaces any issues - invalid PPS numbers, unknown employees, formatting or completeness problems - with clear, row-level errors. You can fix the file and re-upload to refresh the preview, or confirm once you've reviewed them. Every upload is logged so support can refer back to it.

Opt-in, with a safety net

Payroll-driven billing is fully opt-in, per customer. If no file is uploaded by the cut-off, Kota falls back to standard salary-based billing on the usual date and you reconcile any difference in the following month's upload. Reminder notifications go out ahead of the deadline, so nothing sneaks up on you. The outcome is billing that reflects what payroll actually did, without the manual reconciliation.

What's next

Salary sacrifice, health renewals and payroll-driven billing are all live now - jump in and give them a try. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Want to see any of these in action? Speak with our team→