Education Payroll Trusted by College, Schools, and MATs
Our education payroll solutions are purpose built to manage your spine points, pensions, working patterns, and more. Driven by extensive experience with colleges, schools, academies, and MATs, Cintra takes the stress out of handling education complexities for you.
Education payroll software built for colleges, schools, academies, and MATs
There’s no payroll quite like education payroll; multiple pay scales and spine points across diverse role tyles, multiple jobs per employee, multiple pensions, intense government compliance. With over 40 years’ experience delivering schools’ payroll, we know the ins-and-outs of your needs and challenges; so we’ve built a suite of payroll and HR services to manage everything with ease.
Trusted by education
We work with hundreds of education customers across the UK on their school's payroll. They trust us with their requirements, and so can you.
Built for your needs
We’ve built education specific functionality across both education payroll software and outsourced services—from position management to reporting to pensions.
Personalised, holistic support
Our support team aren’t just real people, but real payrollers. They understand how education payroll works so they can offer you holistic, human support.
Total control of your payroll
Our payroll software for schools is packed with advanced functionality; there are no limitations to your spine points, pensions, and everything else.
“Cintra isn’t an off-the-shelf system, it’s built to meet our specific needs. We deal with multiple pension schemes, different sick pay rules for teachers and support staff, and various local authority requirements. Cintra handles all of that because it’s customisable in ways no other system can match. It’s tailored to us, and that makes all the difference. We’d never go anywhere else.”
— Jon Mannion, HR Manager
Manage pay structures and spine points with ease
Multiple roles? Multiple pay structures? Multiple pensions? Both our education payroll software and cloud-portal for service customers have post-specific features allowing you to manage multiple spine points, roles and salaries on a per-employee basis with ease—ensuring accuracy, consistency and compliance.
- Multiple pay scales and spine points
- Multiple pensions
- Multiple contracts and roles per employee
- Date-driven
- Automated calculations and deductions
- Automated payslip, P60 and P45 creation and delivery
Powerful reporting, total compliance
Easily run every essential report you need in Cintra. Our education payroll solutions come with pre-built reports that automate your compulsory reporting and provide additional insights, including:
- Local Government Pension Scheme reports
- HMRC required reports
- Teachers’ Pension and MCR reports
- Further Education Workforce Data Collection
- Performance and productivity
- Planning and financial drivers
CASE STUDY
£90,000 saved on absence
St Chad’s Academies Trust, with 19 schools and 755 employees within the Diocese of Lichfield, saved £90,000 on absence annually and 2 days of payroll resource per month with Cintra’s part-managed education payroll. Here’s how.
Ease your pension admin burden
We know how difficult it can be to keep on top of pension requirements in education. Alongside our payroll software for schools, our full pension administration service is here to ease your burden across both education and private pensions, including:
- Teachers' Pension Scheme
- Local Authority Schemes (LGPS)
- Private pension schemes
- Pension provider payments
- Pension reporting
Partner with real people with in-depth expertise
We’re proud of our support model. Whether you’re looking for education payroll software or an outsourced service, we’ve got people at every level who wholly understand the education sector, and are on hand to support when you need it.
- Software support team made of real payrollers
- Dedicated account management
- Large teams for service continuity
- Qualified payrollers running our outsourced service
- 90% of support calls answered first-time
- 100% of support calls returned in 2 hours
EDUCATION PAYROLL BROCHURE
Find out more about Cintra’s payroll software for schools, and how it powers both our in-house software and outsourced services. We’ve invested over £10 million into our services in the last 3 years along to bring you the best education payroll services, and we’d love to show you how.
Payroll system built for term-time and variable education contracts
Education payroll rarely follows a standard monthly pattern.
Schools, academies, and colleges often manage a workforce with varied contracts, fluctuating hours, and pay arrangements that change throughout the academic year. From term-time only employees and annualised salaries to casual support staff, substitute cover, exam invigilators, and after-school programme teams, payroll complexity can quickly become difficult to manage with generic systems.
Cintra’s payroll software is built to handle the realities of education payroll with greater accuracy and less manual intervention.
Whether you’re processing payroll for teaching staff, support teams, facilities personnel, or temporary workers, Cintra helps education organisations stay in control of calculations, deductions, contract changes, and pay adjustments across every pay cycle. Key capabilities include:
- Support for term-time only payroll calculations
- Management of annualised and variable pay arrangements
- Payroll processing for casual, temporary, and hourly-paid staff
- Retrospective pay adjustments and backdated changes
- Multiple contracts for employees with varied responsibilities
- Automated payroll calculations that reduce admin burden
We’re passionate about payroll for educational institutions
From our Head of Support to our Solutions Consultants to our Product Managers, our team is filled with people who truly care about your school’s payroll. We’re committed to staying up to speed on your compliance requirements, and we’re always listening to your needs—so we can bring you new features and services that make a difference. Our education payroll software & services are:
Tailored
From position management to FE workforce data to pensions, it’s fully tailored to your industry’s needs.
HMRC compliant
We’re HMRC compliant, keeping you up to date with legislative changes to help ease your compliance burden.
Cloud-based
Whether you’re accessing payroll or employees are self-serving, our cloud-based solutions are easily accessible.
Fully secure
We’re proud to be ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified, along with our BACS and CIPP PAS accreditations.
Date-driven
Enable easy maintenance of TPA and LGPS banded contributions and accurately backdate pay, tax, NI, and pensions.
Fully integrated
To not just sync your back-office systems, but to enable transformational HR change that's backed by solid payroll engine.
Manage Teachers’ Pension Scheme and LGPS payroll with confidence
Education payroll comes with pension responsibilities that many standard payroll systems simply aren’t built to support effectively.
Schools and education organisations often need to manage payroll processes tied to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS), Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), workplace pension auto-enrolment, and broader statutory payroll compliance requirements.
Cintra helps education payroll teams simplify these demands with payroll software designed to support complex pension calculations, deductions, reporting, and payroll governance.
Whether you’re managing teaching staff enrolled in TPS or support staff under LGPS, payroll accuracy and compliance are critical—not just for employees, but for audit readiness and operational confidence. Cintra helps you manage:
- Teachers’ Pension Scheme payroll requirements
- Local Government Pension Scheme payroll processing
- Pension auto-enrolment administration
- PAYE and HMRC RTI submissions
- Statutory pay calculations
- Salary sacrifice arrangements
- Payroll reporting for finance and governance teams
- Audit-ready payroll records and compliance reporting
Fully secure and accredited payroll software for schools
Centralised payroll for multi-academy trusts
Managing payroll across multiple schools brings a very different level of complexity.
Multi-academy trusts often need to balance central oversight with local operational flexibility, while maintaining consistent payroll processes, reporting standards, and compliance across every school in the trust.
Cintra’s payroll software helps MAT finance and payroll teams manage payroll more efficiently across multiple entities, locations, and employee groups from a single platform.
Whether your trust operates a small group of academies or a larger multi-site structure, Cintra helps standardise payroll operations without sacrificing visibility or control. Support for:
- Centralised payroll oversight across multiple academies
- Consistent payroll processing across schools
- Multi-entity payroll management
- Payroll reporting for trust finance teams
- Departmental and cost centre payroll visibility
- Payroll journals for reconciliation and accounting workflows
- Secure access controls for central and local users
- Scalable payroll infrastructure as your trust grows
For education organisations managing complexity at scale, Cintra provides payroll software built to support structured growth.
Discover HR and payroll services for the education sector
Payroll Software
Manage your complex payroll in-house with Cintra’s specialist education payroll software.
Payroll Outsourcing
Enjoy the peace of mind of a fully managed education payroll services—flexible and scalable to your needs.
HR Software
Cloud-based HR software that helps education transform their people and payroll processes within a single platform.
HR Outsourcing
Everything you need from an entire HR team, at a fraction of the in-house cost, to deal with your complexities.
“Cintra provides its clients with exceptional service, from consultation, to implementation, support and beyond. Every single employee, whether it be from support, the bureau, reception, implementation, training, or project team, could not be more friendly, supportive or helpful if they tried. You will not find a better organisation to help, assist, support and facilitate in all your Payroll or HR software needs.”
— HR Manager, Long Road Sixth Form College
Chat with us about your education payroll
Our payroll and HR experts are always on hand to talk about your challenges, and how our education payroll services help colleges, schools, academies, and MATs. They’ve been developed especially for your unique needs—so get in touch to see it in action!