Zero hours contracts have been around for many years, and have been a source of controversy for just as long. What are they, what are the controversies, and how are they changing? What Are They? Zero hours contracts are based on flexibility. They establish a contract of employment between the company and the worker, guaranteeing […]
Running a business generates a lot of paperwork. Just on the human resources side almost every action creates a paper trail. Even for a small company, the space taken by these records soon grows vast, so could digital storage be the answer? The Never-ending Paperwork Mountain Paperwork starts to build up even before you give […]
Most people think of annual leave as a simple thing: book it, take it, done. For managers though it can be a minefield. Staffing levels and core tasks need to be balanced against the needs and rights of individual employees. Very quickly the rules your organisation needs to manage annual leave can become complicated. So […]
April 2019 saw the introduction in the UK of Making Tax Digital (MTD), a new regime for business taxes. Under the new arrangements, certain types of corporate tax will need to be filed electronically every quarter, with records kept using software that meets the taxman’s standards. The introduction of MTD has been much delayed and […]
Holiday entitlement at most firms is set on a yearly basis. In any given year each employee has a fixed number of paid days off, based on a legal entitlement, and any contractual rights to extra days. The annual nature of leave means that once a year holiday entitlement resets, with untaken leave usually lost […]
Most organisations these days pride themselves on being “agile”, responding to customer needs as and when they arise. Flexibility is now seen as a core business principle. It’s not just with your clients that flexibility pays off though, your employees need it too. In one study, 96% of employees reported wanting more flexibility in the […]
Running a small business isn’t always easy. As your firm grows, so do the administrative burdens. Increases in paperwork start to take you away from your core business, and complex administration starts to demand either more time or money spent on advisors. For many business owners one of these admin tasks that grows out of […]
Changing the staff holiday planner is a New Year’s ritual at many small and medium companies. Last year’s jumbo-sized calendar comes of the wall, this year’s goes up, and the work of updating the whole staff’s holiday to the planner begins. The simplest method? Especially in a small business it can seem like the simplest […]
We love Microsoft Excel. From bookkeeping to sales reports it has transformed business, but is it really a good way to manage your company’s annual leave? Ever since the rise of the MS Office Suite in the 1990s, spreadsheets have become a go-to tool of business life. So when you realise that you need to […]
Pro-rata holiday entitlement is a topic that seems to crop up all over the internet, at least in business forums and HR websites. Posts that you will find about pro-rata holiday calculations often become very complicated very quickly. Take for example this post on a business forum from a few years ago. In that thread […]