As a participating employer in the UU Organizations Retirement Plan, your organization agreed to administer the Plan for ALL of your W2 employees 18 + years, not just your minister. (please refer to your Employer Participation Agreement-EPA).
To administer the Plan properly and legally, it is necessary to enroll all W2 employees 18+ years in the Plan to 1) create their profile account with the record keeper (Empower) so that they can make their salary deferral election (and choose their beneficiary and investments if they will be making or receiving contributions), and 2) have their account in the system so you can enter their hours worked each remittance period, even if they have no contributions (either employEE or employER).
REMINDER: All W2 employees 18 + years are eligible to participate in the Plan to make salary deferral contributions from the first date of hire. They may also roll in other retirement plan assets to their UU Retirement Plan Accounts, even if they are not making or receiving any contributions.
Since Empower is now our Plan salary deferral record keeper, all employees must make their salary deferral elections in their account profiles at Empower, even if they elect to opt out (select $0). It is important to have this election on file to show that the benefit was offered to the employee. There are IRS guidelines regarding this and can lead to expensive corrections if an employee is not provided the opportunity to make salary deferrals and they come back to you later and say I would have made these contributions if I had been given the chance, but you never gave me the chance. (See the IRS Fix-it Guide Option #6 https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/401k-plan-fix-it-guide).
Regarding hours worked, to track when an employee satisfies the Year of Eligibility Service (YOES), or in some cases never does, it is important to have their hours worked on record. There have been many costly errors over the years by employers who failed to begin making employER contributions when an employee satisfied the Year of Eligibility Service (YOES). Tracking hours worked is how we can not only monitor hours worked at your organization, but in the case of employees who work for more than one participating employer, track hours worked across all employers as all hours count toward determining eligibility for employER contributions.