Since its purchase by Tejwant Karir, the Driver Hire Slough franchise has experienced year-on-year growth of 50%. The company supplies drivers across Berkshire and offers training services tailored to the road transport and aviation industries.

 

The expansion, supported by a £1.17m commercial mortgage from HSBC UK, has resulted in not only much larger premises, but the creation of six jobs including two senior positions. 

 

"Our office is more than ten times the size of our previous premises, with desk space for 20 members of staff," said Tejwant Karir.  

 

"We were finding work for around 60 local people every week, but the funding has given us the capacity and resource to double our recruitment team.

"We’re on track to find work for hundreds more local people this year, which will generate an annual pay roll of about £3m.

 

"That’s a massive boost for the local economy and I’m grateful to HSBC for supporting our expansion in the area."

 

Dale Allen, HSBC UK’s area director for business banking in West London, said: "Since buying the company six years ago, Tejwant has taken it from strength to strength.

 

"It’s great to see the team bolstered with local recruits, enabling the company to improve its offering and reach more businesses across the region."

 

Source: Insider Media South East

 

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An area which is often overlooked as companies expand and grow is how they measure their time and attendance. This is particularly important if they are also recruiting new staff, since this puts more strain on existing processes.

 

The least effective form of time and attendance management is still practiced by hundreds of companies all over the country – the self-reporting paper timesheet.

 

The process typically goes like this: every week or month an employee hand-writes on a printed sheet how many hours they worked on which days during that period. 

 

As you can imagine, this is very likely to lead to people forgetting exact details of their shifts (not to mention being a massive waste of paper). Inexact recording of hours can lead to potential infringements of the Working Time Directive, amongst other issues like tax discrepancies due to incorrect payslips. 

 

Once the first hurdle of employee submission is cleared, this method still has problems up ahead. The next stage is that somebody needs to collect all of those individual timesheets and enter all that data number by number into a spreadsheet in order to send it to the payroll software for processing. 

 

There are a number of workarounds to these problems. Letting employees submit timesheets via email gets rid of the handwriting and environment issues, and making your employees fill in their entrance and exit times on a sign-in/sign-out sheet on the desk makes it less likely they will forget what they have worked. 

 

However, the best solution is to centralise and automate both those parts of the process. With our clocking stations and top-quality time and attendance software, we can do exactly this. 

 

Employees no longer have to spend time and energy filling in the forms, because all they need to do is just clock in or out using their smartcards or fingerprints. The process is over in less than a second, and the data is then automatically sent to the central database. 

 

Payroll staff no longer need to squint at bad handwriting and hope that this number is a 7, not a 1, because the collected data can be exported quickly and easily, in a format suitable for all the leading payroll programs.