In line with requests from users today’s product update by Inform Direct allows users to merge person records together where they are for the same person.
This new process allows you to merge together:
- two shareholder records;
- a PSC with a shareholder;
- a director with a PSC;
- a director and PSC with a shareholder;
- a director with a company secretary
- a director, PSC and shareholder with another shareholder.
Merging persons
Manage company person records
Inform Direct makes it easy to manage person records for a company and across a portfolio of companies
The shareholder information held by Inform Direct will be based on that held at Companies House when the company was first imported. This will be from the last list of shareholders submitted to them which is often incomplete or not in the expected format for the type of person.
This can mean that an individual shareholder’s forenames only include initials or all included in one field rather than split between two – forenames and surname. As a result when importing the company the shareholder is not automatically matched with another record for the same person, eg as director or PSC. This can if identified during the import process being matched.
Then, if new shares are allotted they may be allotted to the director or PSC record and not the shareholder record. This leads to there being two shareholdings for the same actual person. The two shareholdings then need to be merged.
This new easy to use process gives users the ability to merge the two shareholders and complements the convert person process recently introduced.
The merge person process also allows you to merge a director with a PSC where they are currently held as separate records in Inform Direct. When they have been merged, the personal details about both will then be the same, with any changes reported to Companies House.
Having just one merged record for a person in Inform Direct means that you just need to make one change to their personal details to update all the records for them linked to that company at Companies House and in the company’s registers.
This also means that all the shareholdings for the person will be recorded against one person making it easy to see who own’s the company’s shares.
We will be adding the ability to merge persons to companies limited by guarantee and limited liability partnerships (LLPs) shortly.
Let us know any feedback you have
Please do let us have any feedback on this or any other features of Inform Direct and any enhancements that would help you with your company secretarial work.
We continually make improvements to Inform Direct, which you can see on our timeline of updates.
