It's complicated

I was almost tearing my hair out in desperation this morning as I did the payroll. Why should something that I have done week in, week out for twenty years, take me over four hours to complete when it usually takes half an hour? We decided to change to monthly pay during this tax year after fifty three years of weekly pay. In order to make this transition smoothly (roll on 1st August), I have been running a dummy weekly payroll and paying these sums into the staff's bank account. But, at the same time I have been running the real monthly payroll in order to ensure that there are no complications on 1st August. Problem is that some people have regular weekly deductions from their pay (which is fine if they are the same every week)and these have given me real headaches in calculating their monthly equivalents when they have changed the sums during the month. I felt like screaming at around noon. But an hour later armed with a multi columned spreadsheet I had cracked it. I dread to think how long it will take the accountants to work out what I have done.


I am pleased to welcome Danny Rimmer to Instanta this week. We finished last month with an unprecedented number of outstanding orders (none overdue I hasten to add)and Dave felt it was time to beef up the numbers on the shop floor. As always we looked to the lads to come up with suggestions and our machine shop worker Steve Eyres was pleased to introduce his cousin Danny. Danny lives locally and is a keen angler and motocross enthusiast. We hope that he enjoys being part of the Instanta team.


The job applications keep flooding in from the Jobsite website. I've written to a few of the better applicants and asked them why they want to work for Instanta. I've had some very positive responses but some of them look as if they have simply cut and pasted generic comments and I wonder if they have taken the time to look at what we actually do.





Watching ITV's weeklong light entertainment fest that is Britain's Got Talent the last couple of nights raised the question "Has it?" This is the first time that we have seen the show this series and, as the thousands of entries have now been whittled down to just forty, we expected that these would show a pretty high level of quality. We were wrong. Apart from a brilliant dancing dog and some talented acrobats, the acts on Monday and Tuesday were universally bad.So bad that I wouldn't expect them to get through onto the stage at the summer talent shows that we have here in Southport.I'm watching the shows as I thought it might be a good opportunity to have a flutter but so far, dog and acrobats apart, the only way you could bet on any of the acts is for them to lose.

If you don't believe me, take a look at this.