Lloyds Bank Group has funding pot worth billions to help businesses


Lloyds Banking Group has made a commitment to lend South East businesses up to £3.6 billion during 2019. 

This funding is part of their national pot of £18 billion. It is to be used for South East businesses which are entrepreneurs and start-ups, micro businesses which are trying to become larger, and small businesses which would like to begin international trading. The funding will also be available for medium and large businesses which want more growth. 
 
Tara Foley, Lloyds Banking Group’s ambassador for the South East, said: "Access to finance is essential for businesses of all sizes in order to scale and thrive, particularly during this period of political and economic uncertainty.
 
"The South East is one of the UK’s most concentrated areas for economic activity and it’s essential that firms and organisations here have the necessary support to maintain growth."
 
Source: Insider Media South East
 
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Many office-based businesses don’t see the point in using a time and attendance system, but we think differently. It really is an area most SMEs would benefit greatly from investing in.
 
We know from experience that companies find the data we can offer them very useful in building up a bigger picture of their employees’ punctuality and productivity. 
 
Our products are available for most sizes of business: the minimum number of employees needed for our software to work is 10, and there is no upper limit. 
 
For example, HR staff can very easily view and create reports about the absence or lateness occurrences for every single employee in the company. This could give them advance warning about morale problems in individual departments, or allow them to spot who generally rings in sick on a Monday or Friday. 
 
Companies who don’t use time and attendance systems often say that it is good enough for the management to require employees to ring them about absences, and that they will notice suspicious lateness patterns. 
 
But humans are fallible: that’s why we have computers! Unless the manager marks absences down on some sort of calendar they won’t notice any long-term patterns, and in some workplaces lateness can be missed if the manager isn’t actively watching the door! And what if the manager is away or off ill themselves?
 
Getting a system to take care of all this time-wasting monitoring for you is just common sense. 
 
Most importantly for many companies, our time and attendance software is likely to help you significantly increase your payroll processing speed if you currently still use a manual system like paper timesheets. 
 
If you rent your premises, as most businesses do, especially SMEs, and cannot install any extra wiring, your employees can use our web-based attendance recording rather than our physical terminals. 
 
This is called the Self Service Module (SSM), and it allows employees to clock in and out using either a browser version, or a mobile phone app. They can also request holiday using this app, which eliminates the need for cumbersome paper holiday forms.