Durham company experiences pandemic success

Downton Interiors, a family-run furniture company in Durham, has experienced such record sales during the COVID-19 pandemic that the business has moved into large premises.

The company has been going since 2001, when the father-and-daughter team set it up. During lockdown its sales have risen by 75%, perhaps reflecting people’s desire to change the surroundings that they are now isolated in.

Director Robyn Pallister said: “With our sales increasing exponentially we’ve been able to work on growing the company further, selling our own range of products and being able to employ new staff members. 

“At the start of lockdown, we were concerned about how the pandemic would affect our company, being an independent firm, it was something in the back of our mind constantly. However, we are thankful that Downton Interiors has only gone from strength to strength.”

An area that we’ve known many fast-growing SMEs to fall down in is their methods for 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 can enter whatever hours they like if they don’t think they will be discovered. On a less malevolent level, employees may forget their exact timings and put incorrect information, costing the company or themselves money.

Secondarily, the paper timesheets need to be transferred into digital data. In smaller organisations, this is often done by a harassed admin, who spends their evenings or weekends trawling through piles of paper , squinting at bad handwriting and typing the data out into an Excel spreadsheet. This process is clearly also prone to human errors.

To solve these issues, SMEs should use an automated system. 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.

Please get in touch if you think this is what your company needs to thrive.