There are many reasons why you might want to give your company profile a health check. If you've taken over management from someone else at your company then you may be using Orchestra for the first time and this is a great way to familiarise yourself with the site functions. Perhaps you simply haven't logged in for a while and you would like to make sure everything is in great shape.
Here are our 10 tips to make sure your company profile is set up for success:
1. Are your company Administrators current? | Visit Administration > User access. | Users who have 'Owner' and 'Service provider' roles have edit capabilities so you want to make sure these are up to date at all times. |  |
2. Is your share register up to date? | Visit Share register > Transaction history. | The most recent transaction is at the top. It's easy to forget to enter a share transfer or a new issue of shares. |  |
3. Have you entered all of your shareholder email addresses? | Visit Share register > Shareholders. | Supercharge your investor engagement by making sure you've entered an email address for every shareholder. Click on the pencil edit icon to edit the entity and enter a shareholder email. |   |
4. Have your shareholders created their Orchestra account? | Visit Share register > Shareholders. | Orchestra accounts are free for investors. By logging into Orchestra they can access their personal holdings including share transaction particulars, see a statement of holding (share certificate) and read company updates. Here's how to send an email invite to your unregistered shareholders. |  |
5. How are your options looking? Have you entered vesting schedules for all option holders? | Visit ESOP & Options. | You can filter your options by 'No vesting schedule' to pick up any grants that need a vesting schedule. |  |
6. Create and send a communication to engage your investors | Visit Communications. | A typical investor outreach schedule for communications usually starts with quarterly shareholder updates on the company's performance. Start drafting a new communication to shareholders. |  |
7. Have you provided a contact person for shareholder enquiries? | Visit Communications > Info tiles. | Investors may chase you on all of the wrong channels if you don't provide a company contact. One sentence on an Info Tile can make all the difference. Eg. For all investor questions or feedback please contact Alison by emailing investors@companyname.com any time. |  |
8. Have you added important company documents to your Document vault? | Visit Document vault. | Critical company documents such as your constitution, shareholders agreement, resolutions, meeting minutes and financial reports can end up spread across all kinds of folders. Your Document vault is a chance to consolidate and make sure you've got company compliance sorted. |  |
9. Do you need to collect additional information for your shareholders? | Visit Administration > Custom fields. | If your company has dividends on its radar then you'll want to start preparing to collect additional information for your shareholders such as bank account number, tax number etc. This can be stored by shareholder using custom fields. |  |
10. Have you added all of your registered companies and nominees to Orchestra? | Login to Orchestra to visit your entity overview. | There are management benefits to having all of your entities visible in one place, even those with relatively inactive share registers. A missed annual return can cause a company to be deregistered which costs time and money to restore. If you would like the Orchestra Team to add additional profiles to your account please email us: companies@orchestra.io. |  |
Tick off the above list and you will be well prepared for whatever is coming next at your company, whether it's a capital raise, issue of new options, a dividend distribution, or simply the day-to-day of keeping your investors informed and engaged.
Bonus tip: If you haven't activated your NZ Companies Office or ASIC syncing yet then contact us. It's a game changer.
Info Tile example:
