Asher Design and Print, Compare the Policies, Learning Links and Sourced Recruitment have each taken an office at the building. They join the 36 companies and organisations on-site and 23 virtual customers, with up to 350 people on site.

 

Portsmouth Technopole collaborates with the university to support the businesses, and offers them advisory services through its innovation director, Richard May. 

 

Oxford Innovation manages 23 of these centres across the country on behalf of various organisations, with emphasis on start-ups and newer businesses. 

 

Robin Sheppard, centre manager, said: "All four new occupiers share the same ambitions to grow as other firms on site and they will be able to benefit from our in-house business coaching services.

 

"Portsmouth Technopole is a thriving community of big thinkers, game changers and award winners, where occupiers benefit from access to business growth expertise from both the University of Portsmouth and Oxford Innovation in the form of knowledge transfers, internships in a range of disciplines and business consultancy projects."

 

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Oxford Innovation’s aim to focus on helping young businesses is truly admirable, since there is a grey area where businesses aren’t “start-ups” anymore but don’t have years of experience to draw on either. 

 

An area that we’ve known many SMEs fall down in is their ways of recording attendance. Many SMEs are still using paper timesheets and sign-in sheets to manage their payroll, job-costing and sickness absence calculations. This method is very inefficient for multiple reasons. 

 

First, self-reporting paper timesheets are open to user error or even user fraud. Employees could forget the exact details of their shifts if they delay filling in the timesheet and give innacurate numbers. This could affect their payslip, or even their adherence to the Working Time Regulations. 

 

Secondarily, paper timesheets need to be transferred into digital data. This is often done by a very stressed staff member, especially in smaller organisations, who spends their evenings or weekends trawling through piles of paper and typing the data out into an Excel spreadsheet. There is a lot of room here for human error here too. 

 

To solve these issues, SMEs should use an automated system like Time and Attendance Southern’s WinTA.NET. This enables workers to clock themselves in and out every day using smartcards or biometrics, so they no longer need to retrospectively fill out paperwork. The data can be exported straight to common payroll software such as Sagepay, which means that no-one needs to spend hours of their day carefully transcribing awful handwriting into Excel.