Companies & people

How companies are created

Companies in Spyral are built automatically from RCS extracts rather than typed in by hand, and re-importing an extract updates the company in place.

Spyral builds company records for you. You give it the RCS extract, the official record held by the Registre de Commerce et des Sociétés, and Spyral reads the company out of it.

This catches people out on the first day, because the Companies page opens empty with no obvious way to add anything. That is deliberate. The empty page tells you what to do: companies are created automatically when you upload and classify RCS extracts, and the button takes you to the Library.

The two automatic routes

Both routes end in the same company record.

Upload the extract to the Library. Drop the PDF in with your other documents. Spyral reads it, recognises it as an RCS extract, and creates the company from it. You do not have to tell it that the file is an extract.

Import it from the company. Open a company you already have, go to its Finance tab, and choose Import RCS Extrait. Use this when you are about to start the annual accounts work anyway, because the import also starts an annual accounts cycle for the financial year you pick.

The mechanics of the import, including file limits, scanned extracts and what happens to the managers, are covered in Import a company from an RCS extract.

Re-importing updates the company in place

The RCS number identifies the company. Import a newer extract for a company you already have and Spyral updates the existing record. It does not create a second company.

This is how you keep a client current. When a manager changes, the registered office moves, or the share capital is increased, import the new extract and the profile moves forward.

The RCS Extract Timeline on the Overview tab keeps the history. The extract the profile is currently reading from is marked Current, and every earlier one is marked Superseded. Nothing is thrown away, so you can always see which extract a value came from and when it arrived.

What Spyral takes from the extract

The extract populates the legal name, legal form and RCS number, the registered office, the share capital, the financial year end, the managers and their roles, the shareholders recorded in the extract, the auditor where one is appointed, and details such as the incorporation date, NACE code, corporate purpose and duration where the extract carries them.

All of it lands on the company's Overview tab. See The company profile for what each card holds and which fields you can change.

Creating a company by hand

Manual creation exists, but it is the exception rather than the normal route.

Use Add company on the Companies page when you need a company on file before you have its extract. Typical cases are a company you have only just taken on, or a counterparty you want to record against documents. You give it a legal name, and optionally an RCS number and its share capital. RCS details can be filled in later from an uploaded extract.

If you enter an RCS number that already belongs to a company in your workspace, Spyral refuses and tells you the company already exists. That is the duplicate protection working, so look for the existing record rather than working around it.

Finding a company afterwards

The Companies list shows each company's Legal Name, RCS Number, Legal Form, number of managers, the date of its Last RCS Update, and its Status.

You can search by name or RCS number, and filter by legal form, by status, and by whether the company has active managers. The summary line above the table tells you how many of the total you are currently looking at, which is the quickest way to notice that a filter is still applied.

Status and deletion

A company's status is Active, In Liquidation or Dissolved. Change it from the actions menu on the company profile using Change status. The status is yours to set. Spyral does not change it for you when an extract is imported.

Deleting a company removes the company and its links to its managers and to its annual-accounts record. Documents stay in your library. They simply stop referring to that company.