Companies & people

People and their roles

How person records appear in Spyral, the roles that link a person to a company, keeping email addresses right, and merging duplicate records.

Behind the companies sit the people: the managers who sign the board resolution, the associé who approves the accounts, the beneficial owners, the auditors. Spyral keeps one record per person and links it to every company they are involved with.

Open Persons in the sidebar, under Companies.

People records are not typed in either

There is no button to create a person from nothing. Records appear as Spyral works:

From your documents. As documents linked to your companies are read, the people named in them are recorded.
From the RCS extract. Importing an extract records the managers, directors and shareholders it names, with their roles.
When you record a shareholder. Adding a person as a holder on a company's Shareholders tab creates the person record if it does not exist yet.

The list shows each person's Name, how many Companies they are linked to, their Primary email and when the record was Last updated. Search covers names and email addresses.

Roles connect a person to a company

A person is linked to a company by a role: Manager, Director, Shareholder, Beneficial owner or Auditor. The same person can hold different roles at different companies, and more than one role at the same company.

On a company's Overview tab these links are grouped into Managers & Directors, Shareholders, Beneficial Owners and Auditors. Each entry shows whether the mandate is Active or Inactive, when it started and, where it has ended, when it ended.

From an entry you can open the person's profile, edit them, add an email address, or Mark inactive. Marking inactive is how you retire a mandate. It keeps the person and the history, and it can be reversed with Reactivate.

The person profile

Identity holds the first name, last name and full name, the date and place of birth, nationality and private address.

Email addresses holds as many addresses as the person has, each with a label such as Work or Personal, and exactly one marked Primary. Use Set primary to move it.

Linked companies lists every company the person is connected to, with the role, the mandate dates and whether it is active.

Source documents shows the documents the record was built from, so you can check where a detail came from.

Notes is free text for anything your firm needs to remember about the person.

Careful

The primary email is the one Spyral uses. A person with no primary email cannot be sent anything, which matters most for the shareholder who signs the annual accounts and receives the deadline reminders.

Setting a primary email on the person record is still not enough on its own to decide who receives a signature request. Confirm the signer in the Configure dialog on the annual accounts cycle. See Configure the cycle and confirm signers.

Editing a person, and what happens at the next extract

You can edit any person by hand. Once you do, Spyral marks the record as manually edited, and it stops letting a later extract quietly overwrite your work.

Instead, when a newly read document proposes different values for a record you have edited, a Pending reconciliations banner appears on the profile. It puts the current value next to the proposed value and asks you to choose: Keep current or Use proposed.

This is worth checking whenever you import a fresh extract for a company. A reconciliation waiting on the profile is the sign that the register now says something different from what you entered.

Merging duplicates

The same person can end up recorded twice, usually because their name was spelled differently in two documents. Fix it with Merge on the person profile.

The merge runs in three steps. First you find the other record. Then, field by field, you choose which value to keep. Then you confirm.

Known issue

A merge cannot be undone. The record you started from is removed, and its email addresses, company links and source documents move to the record you merged into.

Check both profiles before you confirm, particularly the company links, because a merge of two people who are not actually the same person cannot be unpicked afterwards.

One person, two places

Careful

You may occasionally see the same human twice: once as a person record here, and once as a name carried by the annual accounts relationship data, for instance in a management overlap or an ownership suggestion.

This is a known limitation of an older way of recording people that Spyral is still moving off. It is not a duplicate you can merge away.

Treat the Persons page as the authoritative record. Edit people here, keep the email addresses here, and use the company profile for the roles that link them to each company.