---
title: "Understanding employees and users"
slug: "how-employee-management-works-integrated-help"
updated: 2026-06-03T07:07:46Z
published: 2026-06-03T07:07:46Z
canonical: "help.cintra.co.uk/how-employee-management-works-integrated-help"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.cintra.co.uk/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Understanding employees and users

Throughout Cintra People, you will see references to both employees AND users. However, there is an important distinction between the two.

### Employees vs users

- An **employee** is a person record in Cintra People. It’s used to store salary, holidays, and other personal details.
- A **user** is an account in Cintra People. Whether the user is an administrator, or only viewing their payslip and booking holidays, they will require an account they must access with their email address and password.

### Creating an employee

- All employees are created in the HR module and are then visible across both HR and payroll.
- All employees **must** be assigned to a payroll. Therefore, if you want to add any employees that you don’t want to add to a real payroll, you will have to assign them to a “dummy” payroll.

### Creating a user

- To create an HR user (e.g. an admin, HR manager, or a basic employee with a user account), you must first add them as an employee, then assign them HR permissions. See [Managing employee access to Cintra People HR](/integrated/docs/managing-employee-access-to-appogee-hr).
- To create a Payroll user (e.g. a payroll manager) from an employee, you must create the employee in HR, then assign them payroll permissions. See [Manage payroll access for HR employees](/integrated/docs/manage-an-hr-user-s-payroll-access).
- You can also create a Payroll user directly (without adding them as an employee). See [Manage Payroll users directly](/integrated/docs/payroll-access-users).

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