What's new?

August's updates focus on removing admin from People and Finance teams' plates while offering much greater choice for employees without additional overhead - all wrapped up in an improved employee experience.

Watch Luke review the updates, or read them in more detail below:

Salary sacrifice schemes run from one place

Offering salary sacrifice used to mean a separate provider, a separate portal, and a separate spreadsheet for every scheme. Now you can run them all from Kota.

EV, cycle-to-work, tech allowances and more sit side by side in one place, managed directly by us. We hold the provider relationships ourselves, so you're not sourcing vendors or setting each scheme up one at a time - Kota is the broker as well as the platform

The hard part of running several sacrifices at once is staying compliant, so we built that in. Kota checks every employee's combined sacrifices against minimum wage automatically - showing how much headroom each person has and flagging when a deduction would take them below the threshold, before it happens.

• Every scheme in one place, managed directly by us
• One minimum wage check across all of an employee's sacrifices
• One consolidated deduction report for finance

The result: one place for employees to access every scheme, one report for finance, less admin for HR.

Health renewals, now in-app

Renewing your team's health cover no longer means manual back-and-forth. Health renewals are now built into Kota for Irish Life policies.

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. From there, employees get a guided experience to:

• Review their options and compare plans against the one they're already on
• Keep their current plan or switch to a new one
• Add and manage dependants directly in the app - no need to go through the provider
• Renew smoothly even as a late joiner mid-window, with grace periods handled after the renewal date

This first release covers Irish Life health, where most renewal needs sit today. It's a foundational step toward managing your health cover end to end inside Kota.

Payroll-driven billing

Billing has been based on salary estimates, which meant reconciling the difference by hand whenever real pay varied. Now you can bill on the numbers that actually ran through payroll.

Upload your payroll output to Kota and we'll bill on the real figures. Employees make their pension changes in-app, you run payroll as usual, then upload the file using a template you download straight from the product.

• A preview on upload matches your employees and flags issues - invalid PPS numbers, unknown employees, formatting - with clear, row-level errors to fix and re-upload
• Fully opt-in, per customer
• A built-in safety net: if no file is uploaded by the cut-off, we fall back to standard salary-based billing and you reconcile in the next month's upload
• Reminders go out ahead of the deadline so nothing slips

Billing that reflects what payroll actually did - without the manual reconciliation.

Questions or feedback? Get in touch with your Kota team - we'd love to hear how you're using these.

Kota now supports salary sacrifice arrangements, giving employers a structured way to offer pension contributions through a salary sacrifice scheme - with real tax savings for both employer and employee.

For HR admins and finance teams, the new Salary Sacrifice section in the employer portal includes:

• A setup wizard to configure pension contribution splits (employer/employee percentages, matching schemes, and treatment type)
• An employee table showing each person's current sacrifice amount, remaining budget, and contribution status - with the ability to edit individual percentages inline
• A salary protection tool to set a floor (e.g. National Minimum Wage or a fixed amount) so no employee's salary is sacrificed below the threshold
• An invite flow to bring employees into a salary sacrifice arrangement
• Monthly reports showing total sacrifice amounts and estimated company tax savings, downloadable per period
• A dashboard overview with total salary sacrifice, estimated employee savings, and estimated employer savings

Employees see a read-only Salary Sacrifice summary section in their benefits dashboard, showing their current sacrifice amount and remaining salary available to sacrifice.

Your pension bill now reflects what actually happened in payroll, not an estimate of it. Upload your payroll output each month and we'll generate the pension report and charge from those real figures.

That means the numbers line up first time - no chasing differences after the fact, no manual corrections when pay varies or contributions change mid-cycle. You'll see exactly what's about to be charged before you confirm, and if you skip a month, billing carries on as normal.

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Employees can now manage their annual Irish Life health insurance renewal directly in the Kota app - no emails, no phone calls, no paperwork.

During the renewal window, employees will be prompted to review their upcoming plan and take action.

They can:

• Keep their current plan with one tap
• Upgrade to a higher-cover plan at no extra cost (where available)
• Use a guided plan finder to compare options
• Edit their dependants and update add-ons
• Opt out of their health cover if they choose

HR and admin teams get a renewal progress dashboard in the employer portal, showing exactly how many employees have completed, pending, or skipped their renewal at a glance.

A big sprint for visibility and control. Employees can now see the full monetary value of their benefits, itemised and live-synced, right on the Kota home screen. Our Rules engine got a major upgrade, with country-scoped rules, group targeting, and per-benefit enrolment modes. And the new employer Activity Log gives HR admins a single timeline of every benefit change across the org.

Watch Luke and Tadhg walk through the highlights:

Total Reward: see the full value of your benefits

Up to 20% of your total compensation lives in your benefits — but almost no one sees it that way. Most people still think comp equals pay. Part of the problem is that total reward has always been badly served: a one-off PDF emailed by a broker, or a clunky web dashboard nobody ever checks.

Now employees can see a complete, itemised breakdown of their total compensation package — salary plus every employer-funded benefit, each listed individually by name and provider. When enabled, employees see exactly what their employer is contributing to their health cover, pension, and any other active benefits, in real monetary terms, live-synced from provider data.

The breakdown appears on the home screen of the Kota mobile app and in the employee web portal — your full package, in the palm of your hand, every time you open Kota.

Automation Rules: smarter, more powerful benefit assignment

Assigning the right benefits to the right people is fiddly and manual at scale. The Rules engine has had a significant upgrade so employers can set the logic once and let Kota handle the rest. Employers can now:

• Scope rules by country: a rule applies to employees in a specific region, making multi-country benefit setups cleaner and more precise.
• Target real employee groups: aim rules at named groups of employees, with an optional time window (for example, enrol someone 30 days after joining a group).
• Choose enrolment mode per benefit: each rule can auto-enrol employees immediately, or send an invitation for them to opt in themselves.
• See blocked employees at a glance: the rules list now shows a count of employees with missing information directly on each rule card, so admins can spot and fix issues without digging into individual records.

Rules also re-run automatically when a blocked employee's profile or salary is updated, rather than waiting for the next daily cycle. The result: real control over eligibility without the busywork, and far less risk of enrolling someone in the wrong plan or missing the date they became eligible.

Activity Log: a unified timeline of benefit changes

Kota does a lot under the hood, and until now it wasn't always obvious what was happening or when.

The employer portal now includes an Activity Log — a paginated, newest-first feed of meaningful events across your organisation. Custom benefit enrolments, profile changes, and other benefit activity now appear in a single view, making it easier for HR admins to audit what has happened and when.

Want to see any of this live? Talk to us →

Employees can now see a complete, itemised breakdown of their total compensation package - salary plus every employer-funded benefit, each listed individually by name and provider. The value breakdown appears on the home screen of the Kota mobile app and in the employee web portal.

Employers control whether the feature is visible to their employees via a simple toggle in Organisation Settings. When enabled, employees see exactly what their employer is contributing to their health cover, pension, and any other active benefits - in real monetary terms.

The billing entity detail page has been restructured. Invoices and payroll reporting data are now presented in separate tabs with paginated rows, replacing the previous layout where all rows were stacked. This makes busy billing entities significantly easier to navigate.