A while ago now we posted about a piece of art that we had done for the new office by FLX aka Felix Braun of “Children of the can.” Well, after a very dramatic pause we thought we would finally share with you our footage of all the action!
We still love our art that hangs proudly in the office, and the process is pretty awesome to watch too!
The subject of equal opportunities might be viewed by employers as a minefield, but prevention of a problem is always better than a cure. The Equality Act 2010 came into force on 1 October 2010. It replaces, and in some areas extends, existing legislation on discrimination and equality.
There are compelling reasons for putting an Equal Opportunities policy in place: Protecting the company and our employees, compliance with the Equality Bill 2010 and winning business from the public sector – not to mention making a better environment in which to work.
The principles of fair treatment and respect need to be applied to everyone, regardless of any of the following, so called “protected characteristics”
Discrimination takes place if an employer treats someone less favourably than others on any of the grounds above. We used the Business Link and the ACAS websites for helpful guidance on the scope of the Act and how to set about our policy.
In the simplest terms, being an equal opportunities employer means treating everyone fairly and with respect. Our policy needs to reflect this as it applies not only our employees but also to the way we treat customers, visitors and job applicants. In short, anyone with whom we come into contact. It should ensure a shared responsibility by all in the company to make our workplace a fair environment – and compliant within the law.
Understanding the scope of the act and the meaning of equal opportunities was the first step to putting our Equal Opportunities policy in place. It sets out our commitment to recognising the rights of all individuals to fair treatment. This covers fair and equal treatment at recruitment stage, treating all applicants in an unbiased manner, offering equal opportunities to employees for training and career development and making any reasonable adjustments for disabilities should they arise.
The 2010 Equality Act extends previous legislation to include complaints of indirect harassment (ie not directed at the complainant) if it can be demonstrated that it results in making the workplace an offensive environment. There is also a new provision for “associative discrimination”. This is direct discrimination against someone because they associate with with one of the protected characteristics listed above.
Who is responsible?
The responsibility for implementing good practice should be driven by management but shared by all. In the area of equality that is particularly true. We all have a shared and individual responsibility to treat one another with the respect that we would wish for ourselves, regardless of our differences.
Raising the awareness of managers and employees to the principles of equality and fairness and by building a culture of mutual respect should go a long way towards avoiding problems. Our written policy is the company’s statement of intent. It is putting the those standards of behaviour into practice, together with routine monitoring and review processes, that will build and maintain the culture of respect within and hopefully avoid dispute.
The most important thing for a small business – or indeed any business – is to be able to track regularly and accurately the state of the cash flow. This means knowing how much work has been invoiced, controlling credit, closely monitoring costs and managing client accounts.
However, if it’s the most important thing, it is probably also the routine task that can get overlooked, forgotten or that gives way to more urgent daily issues.
When I joined Simpleweb as office manager a few months ago, I was introduced to Freeagent, the accounting software designed to help small businesses do all this.
Great, I thought. All good stuff that is going to make life easier. Providing the information goes in methodically and accurately, the current situation can be monitored daily.
So, what do we like most about Freeagent?
Well it’ s free! (well almost. There is a small monthly license fee of about £22).
The dashboard on our home page gives a great point of quick reference. It is graphic and clear and shows at a glance the state of the bank account, how much has been invoiced out, payments received and a debtors list so I can see immediately who needs to be chased for overdue invoices. It also shows a tax timeline with key payment dates for PAYE/NI, VAT and Corporation Tax and a quick reference profit and loss summary.
The contacts database means you can keep all your contacts up to date and the work flow section allows you to project manage work for key clients, generating estimates, time sheets and invoices. We use the invoicing function as it links into the payment details and bank reconciliation – but for project management we prefer Basecamp
To manage the cashflow, providing you upload your latest bank statement regularly to Freeagent, you can easily reconcile and account for money in and money out. The information you put in here is categorised into cost centres and feeds into the accounting section and profit and loss making costs monitoring and end of year accounting much easier.
The My Money section can be used for PAYE & NI, generating payslips, keeping records of expenses and more.
What do we not like so much?
Well, three months on, you can imagine my disappointment with one very important, you could say vital, aspect of Freeagent that has turned out to be seriously lacking: the PAYE and National Insurance calculator.
By their own admission, Freeagent say on their website: “. . . this is a simple payslip calculator” and that “if your payroll needs are more complex than the simple calculator supports, you can always use another payroll calculator and edit Freeagent to match”
We were nearly caught out by this simplicity and had been putting blind faith in the payroll figures generated by Freeagent. However, it turned out that there were some discrepancies in the NI payments, albeit small differences. Luckily we realised quite quickly that the system was not really robust enough to cope with the nuances of our payroll and the complexities of UK tax and NI deductions so we have handed the payroll function to our accountant who runs it all through Sage. Peace of mind. I do not think we will be duplicating effort by replicating the data in Freeagent. The net salaries and tax paid will still be accounted for in Freeagent, but not the calculations or payslips which will come from Sage.
Like any system, Freeagent is only as good as the data that is put into it and we have made a judgement call about which parts are really useful to us and then to make absolutely sure that we keep those sections routinely and accurately up to date – then it really does make life easier!
“Tough but fair” and “unavoidable” are the Chancellor’s labels on this particular bottle of medicine. Ominous words maybe, but what are the active ingredients that will affect small businesses? We have been trying to evaluate the impact of the measures and have come to the conclusion that, as a small business, we will be relatively unscathed if not actually helped.
There are also plans to increase the personal income tax allowance from April 2011, scrap the proposed 50p levy on landlines and review the IR35 and small business tax that relates to contractors and intermediaries.
Plans to increase the level of small business rates relief from October 2010. Rate relief will apply to premises valued at up to £6,000 and then tapering to £12,000. Take a look at the Business Link website to estimate your business rates. You can find the rateable value of a property on the Valuation Office Agency website.
There will be an increase in the funds available under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme. This scheme is aimed at encouraging banks to lend to small businesses that are poised to grow but lack the funding to do so. However, the health warning here is that, although the lending is backed by government funds, the banks will still apply their own commercial lending criteria and will not lend if they do not think the loan will be repaid. You can check your eligibility for government backed funding by using the interactive tool on the Business Link website.
The creation of an Enterprise Capital Fund to facilitate equity finance for small businesses. The government will fund 25% and private investors (Angels) the rest.
Thanks to Anitakhart for image
We’ve just moved into our new office and we love it. To brighten things up a little bit we’ve got FLX aka Felix Braun of “Children of the can” fame, doing a graf piece for one of our walls.
We had an awesome weekend watching Felix paint at the dockside. He is such a lovely guy. My kids got involved and did some spraying with only pure encouragement coming from Felix.
There was a lot of pedestrian traffic due to the beautiful spring weather. I was surprised at how many kids asked their parents as they walked by “what are they doing mum?” with the response “they’re doing grafitti, isn’t it amazing/lovely/beautiful…” When I was a kid (and I’m sure Felix will agree) the general consensus was that it was vandalism… Times have changed… Luckily.
See the work in progress below. We’ll be putting it up on Thursday and we’ve got a little stop motion of it being painted to post soon as well…
