Live in Kota: Salary sacrifice schemes your employees value, run from one place

Salary sacrifice used to mean juggling a different provider, portal and spreadsheet for every scheme - limiting the choice that employers can offer their employees without fear of administrative burden or compliance risk.

From today, it doesn't. Kota now shows your salary sacrifice benefits side by side with insurance and pension benefits all from one place - and checks every sacrifice against minimum-wage rules automatically. One app for the employee, one report for finance, and no more juggling for HR.

What we're launching

We already run salary sacrifice pensions for UK businesses. What's new is the rest of it: a portfolio of flex schemes and the engine that manages them together.

From today, we’re offering:

• Cycle-to-work with DASH Rides
• EV with Tusker
• Cyclescheme and tech with Blackhawk Network (BHN)

And many more to come soon.

This is all underpinned by an eligibility and reporting engine that tracks every employee's combined sacrifices, shows how much headroom they have left, and warns before a deduction takes them below minimum wage.

This gives employers access to consolidated payroll reporting - one deduction report instead of reconciling three or more providers by hand, and rolling it up with the rest of your employees’ benefits.

We're your broker as well as the platform - so you don't source or chase providers yourself, or need to stitch together reports. We hold the relationships and run them for you.

Why now

Salary sacrifice schemes aren't new. But managing several at once, directly, with controls across all of them is where Kota transforms the experience.

Offering salary sacrifice usually means bringing two things together yourself: someone to source and broker each scheme with providers, and software to present it to employees. Kota combines both. We hold the provider relationships and help manage every scheme from one system, and we can help you with your compliance reporting across an employee's whole set of sacrifices - not one benefit in isolation.

So a company can offer pension, EV, cycle-to-work, nursery, tech and more side by side, with a single app for the employees to interface and a single report for finance to view.

The overhead problem we solve

Running several sacrifices for one employee without breaching minimum wage is the hard part. Kota can help you with that

Combined deductions - say, pension plus holiday-buy plus an EV - can push a lower earner under the minimum-wage threshold, and you can't put some employees on a non-sacrifice version of a scheme and not others. That risk is enough to stop some finance teams approving salary sacrifice at all.

Our engine removes the guesswork. It shows each employee's combined sacrifices, the room they have left, and flags any deduction that would take them below the line before it happens.

What it means for HR and finance

For HR and People teams, you can offer the schemes your people actually ask for without standing up a new vendor each time. Employees see the full range of options in one place, so uptake goes up without adding enablement work for your team.

For finance and payroll, you get one consolidated deduction report instead of downloading and reconciling from every provider by hand. The schemes are broadly cost-neutral to the business, and the checks are built in.

There's an access benefit too. Providers like Tusker set a minimum employee count when you approach them directly, which locks smaller companies out of EV schemes. Through our partnership, those companies qualify anyway - schemes they'd be turned away from on their own.

What it means for employees

For employees, it's a wider set of benefits in one place, and more take-home value from the ones they choose. Every scheme an employer offers - EV, cycle-to-work, nursery, home and tech schemes, pension - sits in a single view, so there's no separate portal or login to remember for each one.

Because these are salary sacrifice schemes, employees pay for them out of pre-tax salary, which means more of what they want costs less than buying it outright. And with checks  across all of their sacrifices, they could take up more than one scheme with confidence that their pay stays above the minimum-wage line.

Salary sacrifice is one of the most requested capabilities we hear about from the companies we work with. The barrier has never been appetite; it's the admin and the compliance risk of running several schemes at once. That's exactly what we set out to help with.

Want to offer salary sacrifice without the admin and stress? See how Kota salary sacrifice works or book a walkthrough with our team.