Cogita Development aims to promote new science and technology ideas and increase the investment and cultural exchange between Liverpool and China. The business is located in Liverpool Science Park, and las year in 2018 it invested more than £4.5 million in 8 technology start-ups. It also has an office in Canada, in Toronto. 

 

Dennis Zou, director of Cogita Development, said: "We’re incredibly excited to have launched our European headquarters here in Liverpool. Cogita’s purpose is primarily to support young professionals who want to set up their own business and we act as the bridge to connect the UK to China.

 

"I’m often asked by Chinese investors ‘why are you based in Liverpool and not Manchester or London’, and it’s my role to show them why Liverpool is the ideal location to launch their business and, in doing so, they can also now benefit from our incubator office at Liverpool Science Park.

 

"This month’s delegation to Shanghai will be a fantastic opportunity to forge new business links between the two cities and we’re really excited to be attending the China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair during the visit and to be showcasing the region’s diverse investment opportunities in the science and technology sector."

 

Source: Insider North West

 

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Cognita Development’s new Liverpool site is undoubtedly a great sign of confidence in their future UK development. 

 

However, it is very common for a growing and ambitious company such as this to forget about “back-room” tasks such as processing payroll, or recording attendance.

 

If you ignore these tasks and never investigate how to improve and optimise them, eventually they will “break”. This could take the form of your staff making errors in payslips due to an overstuffed workload, or unscrupulous employees taking advantage of lax processes to commit time fraud and take home money that they didn’t actually earn. 

 

So the earlier you can maximise efficiency and accuracy in these processes, the better off your business will be in the long run.

The least effective type of time and attendance management is the self-reporting paper timesheet. This is far too open to human error, such as forgetting to hand it in, filling it in wrong or payroll staff misreading bad handwriting. 

 

The timesheet method is also the easiest for employees to fake entries for time they never actually worked. This fraud becomes more and more likely the less likely the manager is to carefully check every entry: i.e. if a shift manager has too many people underneath them or isn’t given enough time in their working week to go through the timesheets thoroughly. 

 

As your company grows, it becomes a steadily better idea to introduce some automation into your time and attendance management processes. 

For example, our clocking terminals remove the need for (and the risk of) employees reporting their own hours, because every entrance and exit is automatically recorded and sent to the central system. 

 

Managers can check the times on the software, which is easier than shuffling through bits of paper, and the data can be quickly and easily exported to all leading payroll programmes so there is no need for payroll staff to spend hours manually typing up handwritten timesheets.