The right entity management system plays a critical role in the corporate governance, compliance, and long-term health of an organization.
Investing in an entity management system is the best way to ensure that you have the highly specialized functions you need. But software alone can’t provide a permanent solution. Best practices in entity management include a holistic view that integrates people, processes, and systems. Ask any service provider if they use this type of approach, and assess their expertise and capacity to adapt their solution to your organization’s processes and people.
Begin your assessment with these three criteria
If a vendor meets the baseline criteria, assess for these three core areas in an entity management system: level of support, quality of data management, and ease of use.
- Support. The vendor’s expertise and willingness to provide ongoing support beyond implementation is integral to how you can stay current with industry best practices. Carefully assess the vendor’s capabilities, infrastructure, and adherence to security and quality standards. Ask about their track record for successful entity management system implementations, training programs, as well as handling complex or unexpected situations.
- Data management. You should look for data management that gives you the most flexibility, and a system that can automate as many routine processes as possible. An example of this would be a platform that integrates your entity data with jurisdictional rules and provides tools to automate compliance tasks. The ability to access your data from multiple perspectives (such as by ownership, locations, and time frame) helps you quickly respond to internal requests for information.
- Ease of use. An entity management system fuels many corporate activities with vital information, so another key area to assess is how well the system can drive timely, secure collaboration across your organization. Good indicators of this include the ability to allow an unlimited number of users, and whether the system offers robust and flexible reporting capabilities.
Benchmarks for entity management systems
Once the vendor passes the first-level review, consider some of these other important elements in the context of the specific needs for your organization.
Controlled data management
The system should be uniquely designed for corporate business compliance. An entity management solution must support you through formations, mergers and acquisitions, withdrawals and dissolutions, and any other corporate action.
These basic features will maximize time savings and efficiency and help you easily track all your entity standings:
- a customizable calendar with full event alert capabilities
- the ability to upload multiple documents simultaneously into folders that are automatically organized by entity and document type
- customizable data fields.
Dynamic, robust reporting
Templates for both commonly used reports and customizable reports will enable a quick response to regular and ad hoc requests from management and regulatory agencies. Likewise, you should be able to generate custom organizational charts that accurately represent ownership structures.
Corporate structure history should be preserved to produce “point-in-time” reports for key information that varies over time, such as ownership and slates of officers and directors.
Users should be able to search both data and documents easily and quickly. Business entity data must be linked with the underlying documents that govern the data.