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Set up pay rates

Decide what a coach earns — a basic, rates per class type, commission per package, and allowances.

Staff & payroll Owner, finance 5 min read

Pay in Hull is built from a payroll profile. Most academies need only a handful of them, because a profile can be attached to a *level and role* rather than to a person.

Two kinds of profile

A standard profile applies to everyone at a given coach level and role. Set the rate for "Coach Level 2, coach" once and every coach at that level and role is paid by it — including the ones you hire next year.

A custom profile is for one named person, when their arrangement genuinely differs. Use it sparingly: five custom profiles is a pay structure, thirty is a liability.

1. Open Payroll Profiles

Settings → Configs → Payroll Profiles, or from the payroll screen itself. Add to create one.

ScreenshotThe payroll profiles list showing standard profiles by level and role

2. Set the basic

The base amount for the period.

For a custom profile there is a useful middle option — allowance only, where the basic and every class and package rate follow the standard profile for that coach's level and role, and only the allowances are personal. That way a coach with one extra allowance does not fall out of your standard structure and stop tracking future rate changes.

3. Add the rates that vary

a private lesson can be worth more than a group one.

package. This is how a coach shares in what the family paid.

branch responsibility.

4. Understand what a rate change does — and does not do

Rates are dated. A raise applies from its effective date forward; it does not rewrite payslips that have already been calculated.

The same is true of coach levels: payroll pays someone at the level they held during that month, taken from their level history, not the level they hold today. A promotion in June does not retroactively raise May.

This is the whole reason payroll is defensible. If a rate change silently rewrote history, no payslip could ever be defended in a dispute.

One-off payments

A bonus, a claim, or a one-off adjustment is a custom allowance, added from the payroll screen for the month it belongs to — not a permanent change to the profile.

A permanent rate change to fix one month's payment is the most common mistake here, and the hardest to unpick later. Use a custom allowance.

Related: Check the month's payroll · Lock a payroll month · The coach career ladder.