Volumatic cash handling solutions help ease the pressure of the National Living Wage increase coming this April
01 February 2023
With the UK (and indeed most of the World) in the grip of the current cost-of-living crisis - the likes of which most of us have never seen before - many businesses are now really struggling with rising costs and business rates and aren’t bouncing back from the pandemic years in the way they might have hoped. It’s a similar story for consumers too, with many families struggling to make ends meet with rising inflation and having to cut back their spending drastically to simply afford their monthly household and grocery bills.
In response to this, in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement at the end of 2022, the Government announced the largest ever increase to the National Living Wage from 1st April 2023, taking it from £9.50 to £10.42 an hour, and a rise to the National Minimum Wage too, dependant on age. But while this is good news for wage earners and should help move the UK towards a much-needed high-wage, high-growth economy over time, it’s set to make things even tougher for businesses that are obliged to meet the new National Minimum Wage or want to commit to paying their staff the new National Living Wage.
Impact on businesses
The main impact on businesses with the increase to the National Living Wage is the cost of not only their staff wages but also the cost of securing the services of people within the supply chain and delivery services they rely on, who are also needing to pay more to their staff and whose prices will undoubtedly rise as a result.
Many companies are already being forced to pay higher wage bills to attract the right staff in the aftermath of the pandemic, particularly as the job market is currently booming, and with now having to pay even more to meet these wage requirements, as well as other rising costs, many businesses will be forced to look at other options to improve efficiency and save costs.
Everyone in the retail, leisure and hospitality sectors are now not only facing wage increases but also a rise in things like National Insurance Contributions, higher corporation tax, and general business rates, meaning they may have to choose to pass on price rises to consumers when many are already suffering from poor sales or a reluctance to shop in-store or eat out, as consumer confidence is still not back to full strength.
How Volumatic can help
As experts in cash handling, Volumatic can offer businesses in the retail, leisure and hospitality sectors an opportunity to save both time and money with their innovative solutions, as well as increasing the efficiency of how their staff handle cash, replacing the huge amounts of time spent cashing up at the end of the day with more customer-focused activities.
Volumatic can offer a wide variety of solutions that not only provide a significant ROI in a short space of time but will also have a real impact on the way businesses operate. These solutions will allow them to recoup some of the costs of their increased wage bill and rising business rates and achieve the enhanced productivity they need if they want to survive.
A low-cost option could be our range of money counting scales. Our CountEasy range can reduce cash counting time to mere minutes which means less cash handling, fewer mistakes and less downtime.
Volumatic also offers an award-winning end-to-end cash handling solution in the form of the CounterCache intelligent (CCi), which serves as a secure storage device, cash counter and forgery detector in one, meaning staff only touch cash once from POS until it reaches the bank. In addition, all cash data is instantly available on a handy dashboard for staff or head office employees for reconciliation purposes via our intelligent CashView Enterprise software, which has recently been enhanced and improved by our in-house developers.
All Volumatic solutions are designed to enhance security too and are already used by big and small brands across the globe, including Tesco, The Co-op Food Group, Morrisons; Subway, Odeon Cinemas and Wilko.
And while the business community are certainly not taking the hikes in rates and their wages bills lying down - The British Retail Consortium stated last year that while retailers do support the objective of higher wages, they, in turn, need additional support themselves to enable improvements to productivity - now is the time for companies to be thinking about investing in smarter cash handling solutions themselves.
Volumatic prides itself on delivering quality products that increase efficiency and security, in addition to making daily processes easier for all – which has to be a win-win situation for many businesses right now.