A FTSE100 Deputy Company Secretary writes...
I would be very interested to hear how companies with fewer subsidiaries deal with entity management please.
As a newer group, we have <10 subsidiaries, for instance, and it’s quite hard to see the value in committing to entity management software.
Are there any approaches others have used in similar situations? Or, perhaps, software with useful add-ons that makes the licensing/purchase justifiable?
We are FTSE 250 and unusually our topco is also our trading company. We have around 8 dormant subsidiaries, and do not use entity management software. The finance team does the dormant accounts and the legal team does the Cos House filings.
Others can comment on what software you might want to use, but if you want to outsource the whole thing (which is what I did last year – we have c. 20 UK subsidiaries) then:
I got proposals from the entity management section of Link registrars and from Oakwood Corporate Services. I chose the latter:
https://oakwood-corporate.com/contact.html
Whom I thoroughly recommend – fixed price (per company per annum) entity management from a great bunch of people
We have 50 global companies and are FTSE 250. For over 40 years the subsidiaries looked after filings etc themselves but the lack of oversight was problematical. We therefore implemented KPMGs GEM service (very good) to ensure local oversight managed from UK. We average around 30-40 transactions per year (other than standard accounts filings per year) and only have a cosec small team. We don’t have the resource to do all the work from the UK due to other demands and even the liaison with all stakeholders for the above and checking moving docs is very time consuming. For 10 subs we may consider just using a firm like Baker and McKenzie or several local firms possibly if you have enough in house resource.