Company secretarial applications Flashcards
What is a board portal?
What are the 2 board categories of company secretarial applications?
What are 3 examples of the first and 2 of the second?
= a secure online platform to facilitate the security and effectiveness of meetings and decision-making by directors, committees, and senior management
- Entity management, governance, and compliance:
A. Form and online filing packages
B. Statutory register maintenance
C. minutes and resolution generation applications - Meeting portal:
A. Secure communications
B. board pack and other documentation distribution
Online submission of forms and documents, and acknowledgment or rejection of Companies House filings is facilitated via what?
What do software filing and accounts submission each use?
What 2 things are required to software file information?
Companies House XML Gateway
Software filing uses XML while accounts submission uses iXBRL
- An appropriate software package = purchase an existing product or develop an in-house solution
- Have a CH online filing account to pay fees
What is the 1st stage in the process of evaluating the needs of the company secretarial software?
Should the business requirements be the goal itself?
How should the business requirements be documented?
Why is it important to differentiate between wants and needs?
Establish the business requirements = understand what the current system delivers, areas of weakness, and wish list the users of the system would like to see
No = should be a framework from which the standardised procedures are based on rather than the goal itself
In a structured and methodical way, with prioritisation of current and future needs
Needs must have priority over wants
What are the 5 ways of identifying and documenting business requirements for a company secretarial application?
When choosing a new company secretarial system, what are the 3 equations that should be used?
- Focus groups within the company
- Interviews
- Interface analysis
- Surveys
- Observation
Current system ———–> New system
Business requirements + needs = tasks
User requirements + wants = processes/procedures
System requirements + priorities = workflow
Once the business requirements document is finalised, what is the 2nd stage in the process of evaluating the needs of the company secretarial software?
What are the 7 factors that should be considered when choosing a software vendor?
Next stage = creation of a tender document for potential vendors to:
i. demonstrate how their platform matches the required business processes and
ii. identify any additional development work that might be required
- Flexibility = is supplier able to adapt their product for business requirements
- Helpfulness = supplier interested in building a long-term partnership
- Knowledge = do they know which legal requirements and technology solutions work in specific industries
- Foresight = ask about any major system upgrades in the pipeline to avoid having to invest in new software/hardware to take advantage of impending upgrades
- Support = is supplier able to provide staff training to employees and back-end support to IT department
- Accountability = need confidence in supplier that will be on hand to assist to iron out integration issues (without wanting to charge extra)
- Security = supplier should be fully committed to providing assurance of security controls ideally through 3rd-party certifications and audits
Once a new company secretarial application is chosen, what is the next stage? (3rd stage)
How is this done? (3)
Once the data is captured in the new system, what should happen next? (4th stage)
What is GIGO?
What is the key to delivering a truly enabling platform?
An entity management platform must provide data that is what? (3)
Implementation and transfer of existing records to new database (ensure data is up to date and delete or archieve anything that is no longer required)
- Many entity management platforms are able to populate basic company data directly from CH
- Digitally held records might be able to be imported directly onto database
- Other records must be manually entered
A verification process to ensure that data is accurate and error-free (Implementation is just the start and the database must be kept up to date)
Garbage In Garbage Out = flawed input data produces flawed output
being able to deliver the right data to the right people at the right time and creating a single, trustworthy source of data truth (people perform their jobs with confidence if they know they can rely on the data)
Accurate, secure, and accessible
Why must the data stored in a company secretarial application be secure?
How can the software be kept secure? (3)
What has CH introduced to guard against unauthorised filings?
To prevent data loss and stop unauthorised access, tampering, and falsification of the data from internal and external sources
- Ensure appropriate people have appropriate access at all levels of organsiation
- restrict the ability to make changes to the data
- implement regular password refreshes
PROtected Online Filing service (PROOF) = requires changes to be made electronically with a PIN and posting forms will not be accepted
What are 4 benefits of company secretarial packages (Entity Management Systems)?
Entity management systems can:
- Allow cosec to provide all relevant departments with real-time access to entity information in a secure manner
- Become the single trusted source of corporate records = facilitates compliance and governance risk mitigation
- Keep data accuracy and relevance as high as possible
- automatically track compliance deadlines and regulatory changes ensuring, as far as possible, 100% on-time completion and compliance
