Managing education payroll: tips and tricks to get it right
Payroll is key for a school or trust in ensuring accurate and timely pay for employees – but managing a payroll for education means balancing complex pay structures, teacher pensions and managing absences. How can you overcome the challenges of managing a payroll for education?
What does education payroll involve?
Managing education payroll means balancing a range of factors and moving parts, including:
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Salary processing: likely the first thing that comes to mind when we think of payroll, it’s key that staff salaries are calculated, processed and distributed accurately.
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Managing pensions: teacher pensions are based on a percentage of each individual teacher’s salary, so can be complicated to manage properly.
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Leave tracking: all staff members’ time off requests and leave, including sick leave, need to be recorded and accounted for if they impact salaries.
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Monitoring timesheets: teachers’ and staff’s working hours need to be monitored and accounted for in salary processing.
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Taxes: taxes need to be calculated for staff across salary bands and deducted from monthly pay.
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Ensuring compliance: while managing each of these considerations, it’s essential that policies and laws regarding payroll and employee wages are followed and records are kept to evidence this.
What are the biggest problems schools face in managing education payroll?
Being responsible for payroll is often tricky, with a range of factors to consider – but there are challenges schools face that make payroll for education uniquely complex:
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Teacher salaries: class teacher pay is based across two pay scales, with another for leadership roles – plus additional payments for extra responsibility and project work. This means all teachers in a school could have different salaries and these could change month on month.
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Staff pensions: a school’s contribution to a teacher’s pension is based on a percentage of the teacher’s salary – so if a salary is changing, a teacher’s pension will too.
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Payments for temporary and supply teachers: alongside varied salaries for full-time staff, many schools also employ teachers on a temporary basis and supply teachers – this requires more calculations to ensure daily rated and pro rata payments are correct.
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Lack of administrative time: Schools are very busy environments, and payroll management often takes up time that might be better spent elsewhere.
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Time off and parental leave: manually calculating pay for time off such as maternity leave can be tricky and miscalculations can cause unnecessary stress for staff members at an important and potentially already stressful time.
How can these problems be addressed?
While there are challenges in managing education payroll, they can be overcome. Staying informed and understanding payroll options is essential.
Stay updated on payroll trends, processes and policies
It's key that staff are aware of and understand payroll processes and policies. Ensuring staff are up to date on payroll changes not only ensures compliance but can also save valuable time by:
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Helping staff to avoid making mistakes that need to be corrected later
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Ensuring staff are aware of areas where their processes could be streamlined
Staff can stay informed in a more time efficient way with peer support and information sharing.
Organise time to adapt
Finding time to make changes to payroll, such as when salaries change, can make payroll management feel overwhelming.
Planning ahead and organising time to make changes – this could even be a long-term timeline, for example when multiple pay bands will change around the same time – can help make this easier.
Payroll software systems can also save time by automating changes.
Education payroll software
Software like Tes EduPay is streamlined and scalable software for payroll processing, compliance and reporting. It reduces the risk of errors and makes it easy to update information and data, gives staff visibility over their own pay and brings all your records together into one place.
To manage an education payroll accurately and efficiently, schools and MATs need a platform they can trust. Education payroll software like EduPay supports you to take control, so you can do more in less time.
Better education payroll management with Tes
Managing payroll in education settings is complex, but it’s essential that it's done accurately and efficiently.
EduPay enables you to streamline your payroll, with everything you need in one platform – including integration with HR modules and Budget Planning Software – minimising confusion and saving precious time.