Companies & people

Shareholders and ownership

Record owners, subsidiaries and percentages on a Spyral company, read the ownership diagram, review AI-suggested ownership links, and set the primary signer safely.

Ownership is recorded on the company profile, on the Shareholders tab. Open the company and choose that tab.

This is the only place ownership is edited. If you are working in the annual accounts and reach a card telling you that shareholders, beneficial owners, subsidiaries and the signer are managed on the company profile, that card is pointing you here. Follow it rather than looking for a second set of controls.

Read this before you set a signer

Careful

The "Use as primary signer" checkbox on this tab does not reliably decide who receives the signature request.

Ticking it gives the person a Signer badge and puts their name in the Primary signer figure at the top of the tab. On most installations it does not change who the shareholder resolution is actually sent to, so the badge can be right while the email goes somewhere else, or nowhere.

The place that always works is the Configure dialog on the annual accounts cycle. Setting the shareholder there writes the recipient in both places at once.

Always confirm the signer in Configure before you generate anything. See Configure the cycle and confirm signers.

If a shareholder receives nothing after dispatch, this is almost always the reason.

What the tab shows

Four figures sit across the top:

Shareholders, the number of holders currently holding shares.
Total %, the percentages on the shareholder rows added together.
Subsidiaries, the number of companies this company holds an interest in.
Primary signer, the person currently flagged as the signer, or Not set.

Note

If Total % does not come to 100, it usually means a holder was recorded without a percentage, or an old holding is still counted. Open the Owners list and check the rows before you rely on the figure.

Below the figures are the Owners list, the Subsidiaries list, any Pending suggestions, and the Ownership diagram.

Adding a shareholder

Choose Add shareholder on the Owners card. You are connecting a holder to this company, so start by finding the holder.

The search covers the companies and the people already in your workspace. If the holder is neither, choose Record as foreign holder and type the name.

Then fill in what you know:

Shares held, the number of shares.
Percentage, from 0 to 100.
Share class, for example Class A, where the company has more than one.
Effective from, the date the holding started.
Use as primary signer, subject to the warning above.

Nothing except the holder is compulsory, so you can record a holding you only partly know and complete it later.

The three kinds of holder

Company. Another company in your workspace. The row links straight to that company's profile, which is what makes a chain walkable in both directions.

Person. A natural person from your people records. See People and their roles.

Foreign holder. A holder with no Luxembourg registration, recorded by name. This is for ultimate owners in structures that have no RCS record of their own, and it is the right answer for the top of a chain that leaves Luxembourg. A foreign holder is a name on a row rather than a full record, so it has no profile of its own to open.

Ownership records keep their history

Every holding carries the date it became effective and, once it ends, the date it ended. Ownership in Spyral is a record over time, not a snapshot.

That is why the menu on a shareholder row says End / remove rather than delete. It marks the holder as no longer holding shares in this company and keeps the historical record. Last year's structure stays readable, which is what you need when you are working on last year's accounts.

Note

Use End / remove when a holding has genuinely ended, such as a share transfer. Do not use it to correct a typing mistake, because you will leave a closed holding behind that nobody can explain later. Add the corrected row and end the wrong one on the same date.

The ownership diagram

The diagram at the bottom of the tab draws the ownership graph as boxes and lines.

Two views:

Direct only shows this company and the holders and subsidiaries one step away. This is the view the tab opens on.
Full tree follows the chain as far as it goes, up through the holders and down through the subsidiaries.

Export PNG saves the current view as an image, which is the quickest way to get a structure chart into a file note or an email.

Open full screen gives the diagram the whole window and opens on the full tree. This is the view to use on a group with several layers.

Two limits are worth knowing. The tree stops after twenty levels and tells you when it has done so. And on a narrow screen the diagram is replaced by a text view, because a structure chart is unreadable on a phone. You can also open that text view deliberately using Show as table, which lists each relationship by Level, Holder, Owns and Share %. It is the better view when you want to copy the figures rather than look at the shape.

When the tab will not let you add anything

Careful

If the tab opens with a card saying the company is not linked to an annual-accounts entity, ownership editing is blocked and Add shareholder is unavailable.

This happens on companies created by hand, because there is no RCS extract behind them. Import the company's RCS extract and the link is made for you, after which the tab works normally. See How companies are created.

Who can do what

Recording, ending and suggesting ownership all need permission to manage ownership, which consultants and administrators have. A viewer can read the tab and the diagram but the controls are unavailable, and hovering over one explains why.