A new game-changing tool for Beneficial Ownership compliance

How much time is Beneficial Ownership compliance really costing your practice? Untangling complex ownership structures and chasing down information for annual filing to CIPC is a manual, time-consuming process. With Xero’s new Beneficial Ownership functionality, you can turn that compliance headache into a streamlined, visual, and automated process. 

Beneficial Ownership, now available in Xero’s integrated practice management and tax solution via the Gatekeeper app, is designed to help you effortlessly manage compliance, minimise manual effort, and reclaim valuable time.

As companies cannot file their Annual Return without submitting a full trial of ownership, there are serious consequences to non-compliance. Xero’s Beneficial Ownership solution aims to transform this process. It enables accountants and bookkeepers to effortlessly handle all required documentation with an interactive, visual approach to building organograms and powerful auditability.

Here are the key features of Xero’s Beneficial Ownership solution and what our partners are saying:

Build a visually interactive organogram
Visually build out the organogram so you can see a dynamic view of ownership structures and get a complete picture of ownership across a group. The Individual Holdings Search allows you to trace common beneficial owners and quickly find all of an individual’s holdings within a complex structure. This helps make due diligence easier.

Instantly produce required documentation
Instantly create the required registers and documents based on the data in the organogram. This automation means you can skip the intensive manual data entry and ensure accuracy and consistency. 

“The generation of Beneficial Ownership documents was really helpful and saved a lot of time.” – Dewald Taljaard, APS Africa

Historical beneficial ownership snapshots
‘Finalise’ an organogram at a specific point in time and recall that exact structure later. It ensures the data you submit to authorities is accurate for the submission date, and that you don’t lose historical information.

See a detailed audit trail of changes
Easily identify changes between dates with a detailed history view that tracks who made changes, when, and creates an uneditable instance of the finalised organogram. This provides robust compliance and accountability, simplifying audits and investigations.

Single source of truth for client data
Beneficial ownership data doesn’t live in isolation. It is seamlessly integrated with the existing client record in Xero HQ and Xero Practice Manager for the company for which submission is due. This keeps your data clean and organised, avoiding non-client data from the beneficial ownership register getting tangled up with your main client list. 

Guidance for identifying natural beneficial owners
The organogram building process guides you on how deep to go to find the natural beneficial owners. It simplifies compliance by visually helping you to identify the ultimate natural persons, cutting through layers of complexity.

“We love how user-friendly it is. The platform is simple and intuitive — even team members with little to no company secretarial experience find it easy to understand and use.” – Michiel Claassen, Dough Getters

Register for our webinar to see it in action

By automating some of these critical but incredibly time-consuming tasks, Xero’s BO tool gives you valuable time back and keeps your clients compliant. To learn more about how it works, register for our upcoming webinar here, or get in touch with your Xero Account Manager to discuss the next steps.