Estate agent flourishes in Newport

Smooth Moves Property Agents, an estate agency based in Newport, has moved to new premises and reported a successful last quarter.

The property market in SE Wales was doing well pre COVID, thanks to the removal of the Severn tolls, competitive area pricing and recent investment in Newport, but COVID ground everything to a halt.

“The phones and emails quite literally stopped,” said Alison Jarman. “For a couple of weeks, I really did fear for my business. We furloughed our team and eagerly awaited news regarding what was going to happen next.

“We used the time to work on tasks I had wanted to do for a while but had simply not had the time. One was to improve our online presence and the other was to seek new premises to enable Smooth Moves to continue to grow and expand.”

“Not being in the office we realised that we did not need a city centre location and could focus our efforts on finding a property we could all safely return to and with better access to the area we cover.

“We opted for a large suite in Beechwood House, Newport and were able to secure favourable terms with Newport City Council who own the property.”

When the restrictions were finally eased Jarman said the agency was “almost overrun with requests for valuations and viewings and struggled to keep up”.

The business now plans to recruit multiple different roles to deal with its increase in customers since the relaxation of lockdown.

Moving into a new building is the perfect time to assess your current payroll system, specifically the way that you record employee attendance and their hours worked.

Many companies, even in today’s high-tech world, still use weekly paper timesheets to record employee working hours. These have more downsides than they have advantages.

For example, they are very easy for an unscrupulous employee to fake. If there is no way of monitoring their attendance apart from their own self-reporting, then they can easily put in overtime or prime time shifts that they didn’t actually do.

Even an honest employee could forget exact details and fudge an entry. Inaccurate working hours could put you at risk of breaching the European Working Time Regulations.

Another example is the incredible amount of processing time that timesheets can cost payroll staff. They need to transfer often illegible handwriting individually onto Excel spreadsheets in order to convert it into data they can deal with for payroll. One typo could completely change an employee’s payslip for that month.

For accurate, trustworthy time recording, contact us today for a quote, a query or even to book a demo. We’ll be very happy to show you what our system can do.