Berwickshire hotel on sale after second wave of disease disaster

The Carfraemill hotel is now on the market for £795000.

The well-known Borders venue, situated just off the A68 in Berwickshire, came to fame when Jim Sutherland became the first person to be prosecuted for serving beef on the bone in the wake of the BSE crisis in 1997. The case was thrown out in April 1998 by the sheriff.

In the intervening twenty-two years, Jim and his wife Jo Sutherland extensively expanded the hotel into a wedding venue, including an award-winning restaurant.

The husband and wife team are now retiring, but will open the hotel from COVID19 lockdown so that the new owners can take on an operating business.

Jo said: “After 23 wonderful years, it’s time for us to retire from Carfraemill. Jim and I are both much nearer to 70 than 60 and it’s time to live our lives as most of our friends now do – in retirement. We had always planned to retire later this year, though there is no doubt that Covid-19 has made it more complicated than it might have been.

“The dedication and enthusiasm of a new owner is exactly what’s needed at this time. We have a fantastic and experienced team of staff here and a future owner will be incredibly lucky to have them on board.

Creating a brand-new hotel is the perfect time to examine the intended attendance policy and management, before bad habits sink in and while it is simple to install technology during the build process.

Thanks to a profusion of temporary, agency and zero-hour staff in the hotel industry, many payroll departments are still struggling with paper timesheets and sign-in books, self-reported by staff.

These have many disadvantages, including employees losing or forgetting them. Fraud and mistaken information is also likely to occur with this format. Stories abound online about employees filling in timesheets for shifts they never attended, not to mention the lesser evil of falsifying timesheets to hide lateness.

Paper timesheets are also hugely inefficient for payroll staff – they need to be collected, filed, and then their information transferred manually into the payroll system.

Purchasing a workplace management system from Time and Attendance Scotland will solve these issues. If employees have to clock in at the clocking terminal before entering and leaving, there will no longer be any ambiguity about working hours and no need to sort through hundreds of timesheets at the end of the week or month.

Supervisors and managers can also check all of the timing data for their assigned team members easily within the software, which gets rid of squinting at bad handwriting, and also gets rid of the need to chase people up for handing them in late.

Please get in touch for more information.

COVID19: We provide online product demos, as well as online training once products are purchased, and our engineers follow a strict social distancing policy.