The company, which provides equity and debt funding services to small and medium businesses, will be moving from its current site in Castlefield into the Bauhaus building on Quay Street, opposite the Spinningfields financial district and adjacent to St John’s Quarter. The Bauhaus building is recently refurbished in order to provide grade A office space. The lease Praetura has signed is for ten years. 

The relocation is part of the company’s impressive success since its founding in 2011 by Mike Fletcher, David Foreman and Peadar O’Reilly. In that time, it has tripled its headcount and established a loan book of more than £250 million. 

 

Chief executive Fletcher said: "After spending eight years in Castlefield and experiencing rapid growth throughout that time, we’re delighted to be moving into bigger offices in the heart of the city.

 

"The extra space will be vital as we continue to growth our talent base and meet the needs of North West SMEs."

 

Sarah O’Connell, asset manager at Orchard Street Investment Management, added: "We are delighted to welcome Praetura as the first occupier in the newly repositioned Bauhaus so soon after completion of the refurbishment.

 

"This further supports our conviction to commit significant capital to repositioning the building to provide genuinely unique office space.

 

"Bauhaus has been redesigned to offer truly occupier focussed office space with an emphasis on service. In a world where office occupier expectations are constantly evolving, we have sought to go above and beyond our competition, providing an occupier business lounge, extensive cycle parking and shower facilities, installation of a resilient backbone fibre connection and concierge service."

 

Source: Insider Media North West

 

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An area that we’ve known many SMEs 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. 

 

Secondarily, the paper timesheets need to be transferred into digital data. In smaller organisations, this is often done by someone who spends their evenings or weekends trawling through piles of paper and typing the data out into an Excel spreadsheet. 

 

To solve these issues, SMEs should use an automated system like Time and Attendance North West’s WinTA.NET software. 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.