---
title: "Employees vs users"
slug: "employees-vs-users"
updated: 2026-06-23T09:26:35Z
published: 2026-06-23T09:26:35Z
canonical: "help.cintra.co.uk/employees-vs-users"
---

> ## 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.

# Employees vs 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 their payments, 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 **must** be created against a payroll.
- You can add an employee to multiple payrolls only if the payrolls have separate PAYE numbers. See [Add an employee](/payroll/docs/add-an-employee).

> [!NOTE]
> Note: If you want to add any employees that you don’t want to add to a real payroll, you will need to create and assign them to a “dummy” payroll.

### **Creating a user**

The procedure for adding users is slightly different, depending on whether you’re adding a payroll, Bureau, or Employee Hub user. See [Overview of Payroll user management](/payroll/docs/overview-of-payroll-user-management).