Five structures,
each producing a behaviour.
The first two rows are the real decision and most centres take the first without considering it, because it is what everyone does. Paying only for taught hours means a tutor who has kept Tuesday at five free, and whose student cancels on Tuesday at four, earns nothing for an evening they set aside. Do that a few times and they will start filling that slot with something else, and then you will have a tutor who is unavailable when the student returns. You bought a lower wage bill and paid for it in reliability.
The last row is worth a warning. Paying a percentage of what the family pays sounds admirably transparent and creates two problems: the tutor now knows your margin, which changes every future conversation about rates, and every price adjustment becomes a negotiation with staff as well as a decision about the market. A fixed rate per hour with published bands achieves the same fairness without handing over your pricing.
Somebody absorbs
the empty slot.
When a family cancels late or does not appear, an hour of capacity has been destroyed and cannot be resold. Three parties can bear that cost: the family, through a late-cancellation policy; the tutor, by not being paid; or the centre, by paying for an hour it did not bill. Most centres have never decided which, so it defaults to the tutor, silently.
The arrangement that works is to charge the family for late cancellations under a published policy, pay the tutor for the slot, and treat the small residue as a cost of running the business. That keeps the incentive where it belongs — with the person who cancelled — and keeps the tutor willing to hold time for you. It only works if the policy is actually enforced, which is the subject of the no-shows article; a policy that is waived whenever anyone asks transfers the cost straight back to the tutor and to you.
Whatever you decide, write it in the tutor agreement rather than leaving it to be discovered. The first late cancellation is the moment a new tutor finds out what kind of centre this is.
The spread has
real work to do.
The difference between what the family pays and what the tutor takes is not profit; it is what funds everything the tutor does not do. Round invented numbers to show the shape, which you should replace with yours: a family pays €50 an hour and the tutor takes €30, leaving €20. Out of that comes finding the family in the first place, matching and briefing, the admin around scheduling and invoicing, cover when the tutor is ill, the slot you paid for and did not bill, and your own time managing all of it.
Which means a spread that looks generous at a glance is often thin once the work is counted, and a centre paying most of the rate away has bought itself a job rather than a business. If the arithmetic does not work at a rate that attracts good tutors, the answer is usually that the price to families is too low rather than that tutors should accept less — and the plan and costs article has the full version of that sum, including why the first hire often loses money.
One structural note: group sessions change this arithmetic more than any negotiation can, because one tutor-hour becomes several student-hours. A centre struggling to make one-to-one margins work should look there before squeezing pay.
SprintUp is not
a payroll system.
Stated plainly, because it is a reasonable thing to assume about a platform that already holds your classes and your money. There is no function in SprintUp that pays a tutor, calculates deductions or contributions, produces a payslip, or files anything with a tax authority. It does not send money to your staff. Any vendor in this market implying that a school platform replaces payroll or accounting is describing something that is not there.
What it does hold is precisely the record that a payroll run needs and that most small centres reconstruct painfully each month: which sessions were scheduled, which ran, who taught them, who attended, and what each family was charged. Student payments go to the school's own Stripe connected account — we take 0% of them — so the money is yours from the moment it arrives, and the platform's job is to tell you accurately what happened so that paying people is a five-minute job rather than an evening cross-referencing a diary against a bank statement.
So the shape is: platform for enrolment, sessions, attendance and what families owe; accounting and payroll package for the books and the payments; the first feeding the second. And the employment status question underneath all of it — employee or self-employed, and what follows from that — is local, consequential, and worth proper advice before the second tutor rather than after the fifth.
A fixed date,
whether or not families have paid.
The fastest way to lose good tutors is to pay them late, and the commonest cause is a centre that waits until the families have paid before paying the people who taught. It is understandable and it is a mistake. Tutors in a small centre are usually not in a position to absorb an unpredictable payday, they will assume the business is in trouble, and the good ones — who have other options — will quietly take them.
Pay on a stated date every month regardless of your collections, and solve the collections problem separately, where it belongs. That means collecting from families before or at the start of a block rather than after it, which is the same conclusion the packages article reaches for entirely different reasons, and having a short arrears process that runs on schedule. A centre whose money arrives before the teaching can always pay on time; one that invoices in arrears is permanently gambling on other people's diaries.
Finally, tell tutors what they will be paid before the month it changes, and review rates on a predictable cycle rather than when someone asks. A tutor who has to negotiate for an increase concludes that staying quiet costs money, which is exactly the wrong lesson for the person holding your student relationships.