HR and payroll support for universities
Universities and higher education colleges are amongst the UK’s most multifaceted organisations. Your HR and payroll teams must tackle complex pay structures, pension schemes and multiple contracts of employment. They’re also tasked with employing the best people and attracting a diverse workforce to ensure your curriculum is delivered to the highest standards.
A specialist HR and payroll system can simplify your admin, ensure pay accuracy and attract high quality lecturers and academic support staff by automating your everyday tasks. Our range of software and services can help support your organisation to ensure you deliver high quality teaching.
We can help you with:
- Streamlining your recruitment with software to help you find the right talent
- Comprehensive payroll that can support your complex structures and pension schemes
- Ensuring you’re always in line with compliance and data protection legislation

HR and payroll to meet the challenges you face
We’re here to help you meet and exceed your university’s objectives. We support 25% of The Guardian's top 20 universities and cover 24% of all university employees. As a leading provider of HR and payroll in this area, our system covers over 50 universities across the UK.
Our industry experts have listened to the needs of education professionals and we can help you:
Overcome complex payroll challenges
Our specialist payroll solution ensures complete pay accuracy by automating processes to ensure employees paid by the hour, term or the academic year will be paid accurately and on time, every time.
Attract and retain the best new recruits
Our streamlined online recruitment provides helps you reach a wide range of candidates enabling you to attract international academics from lecturers and teachers to educational support staff
Free your time and reduce admin
Our solution automates all your HR tasks, freeing up your time and reducing your costs. You can manage sickness, timesheets and staff rotas from one place, with automatic reporting built in.
Stay compliant and secure
Keep employee records secure with our comprehensive HR and payroll software that is frequently updated in line with all legislation, and backed up by our state-of-the-art security processes
Provide quality training
Deliver structured and targeted training by matching role requirements with people profiles. Managers can monitor employees through training processes with an up-to-date view of progress.
Giving employees greater autonomy
Using employee self-service and chatbots, on desktops and mobiles, your employees can find answers and information quickly and easily
Get in touch for your free, no obligation quote.

Making your complex payroll simple
With different grades of staff – from course leaders, to lecturers, to academic support staff – your people are employed on different pays scales, contracts and working arrangements.
iTrent’s comprehensive payroll software, designed with higher education in mind, ensures all your employees, whether paid by the hour, the term or for the academic year are paid accurately and on time, every time.
Our payroll solutions let you run multiple payrolls simultaneously, access data to process your pension schemes, and reduce manual processing to save you time.

Seamless recruiting and onboarding
In the competitive world of universities, your ability to attract international academics to provide expertise is more important than ever. By streamlining the whole journey, you can speed up your recruitment and on-boarding processes and save time by eliminating the need to endlessly re-enter applicant data.
Compatible with Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) standards, our Match and Gap analysis tool, candidate skills and qualifications can be paired with available vacancies to make the application journey easy for everyone involved. With the ability to create screening questions, you can ensure candidates meet your needs and meet every Disclosure and DBS check. You can even tailor your recruitment portal with your own university or college branding, providing a professional presence for prospective employees.

Improve compliance and data security
For academic establishments with complex staff records, guaranteeing personal data security is an increasing challenge.
Our cloud-hosted HR and payroll system enables you to store all your employee records and documents in one central and secure location. This makes it easier to stay on top of compliance and data protection rules as well as reducing admin for HR and payroll teams by avoiding repetitive data entry.
Our solutions are backed up by state-of-the-art data centres with prevention technologies, disaster recovery and ISO 9001 and 27001 accreditations so you can have total confidence in how your employee data is stored.

Case study: Nottingham Trent University
With roots going back to 1843, Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is one of the UK’s leading universities, winning The Guardian’s University of the Year award for 2019. The University employs 4,000 people at any one time across three main sites in Nottingham, Clifton and Brackenhurst. NTU needed to streamline its HR and payroll systems.
Learn how they replaced insufficient paper - based processes and expand their data reporting.
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